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A Chronology 
of Tech 
History 



by Tom Merritt 



A Chronology of Tech History 

by Tom Merritt 

Creative Commons © 2012 Tom Merritt 

Printed in the United States of America 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- 
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. 

http://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US 
ISBN: 978-1-300-25307-5 



Introduction 



Welcome to the Chronology of Tech History. 



Get ready for an excellent true story of geeky stuff being discovered, 
ignored, developed, misused, used right, triumphing and sometimes falling 
back to Earth. Literally. 



You're going to see rockets that go from experiments to weapons to 
spaceships. You'll see broadcasting technologies go from sputtering 
patents to curiosities that barely work to become major media businesses. 
You'll see the beginnings of computers as behemoths belching punch 
cards right through to the to the launch of the Internet. 



There's also some stuff about weather and the metric system. Because 
geeks like measuring things. 



Not everything is in here. This is work of factual entertainment. 
Entertainment because it was enjoyable for me to research and write, is 
meant to be enjoyable to read, and is not meant to be taken as a 
comprehensive account of the history of technology. 



It's factual however in that every entry was actually researched to find a 
primary source, or failing that, a trustworthy secondary source. I have a 
high level of confidence that what is described actually happened on these 
dates. See the epilogue for me details about citations. 



That brings me to another point. Only things that could be pinpointed to 
happening on a particular day are included here. So the creation of the 
first mechanical computer doesn't have an entry. However, the discovery 
of the Antikythera Mechanism does. 



I also tried to focus on things that happened besides births and deaths. I 
tried to only include births when the person played a significant role in 
other entries later in the chronology. In a couple cases the birth was 



included because it allowed the telling of a story that didn't have a date 
associated with it. Leonardo da Vinci is a good example of that. Deaths 
are rare in this book. Births are so much more positive, so a death is only 
included if the events surrounding it were significant, think Alan Turing, 
or if the death dominated the world news, such as in the case of Steve 
Jobs. 



I constructed this book by picking three, and sometimes four things, that 
happened on every day of the year. So some years are sparser than others. 
I didn't make any special effort to find things to fill out a particular year. 
In fact several years in the late 19th and early 20th century originally had 
no entries. I did seek out entries for those poor years, just to keep the 
flow. You can guess most of them because they only have on entry. 



So if you have a favorite thing you don't see in here, there are two reasons 
why it didn't make it. I didn't know about it, or it wasn't as cool as the 
other three things on that day. But I welcome your feedback! See the 
epilogue for more details on how you can suggest additions and 
corrections. 



But enough introducing. You've probably already skipped this part to get 
to the good stuff. For those who haven't here's a bonus. Send me an 
email to tommerrittCSjtommerrit.com with the subject line "I read the 
introduction" and I'll give you read access to the Google Spreadsheet that 
has all the unverified entries. There's hundreds of them. Lots of those are 
really very wrong but I haven't spent time tracking them down. Still it's a 
fun spreadhseet to page through if you like that sort of thing. 



We start with the ancient times! 

Tom Merritt 

At his desk 

San Rafael, California 

2:32 PM September 29, 2012 



ANCIENT TIMES 



This chapter is short, just four entries. But they are some of the building 
blocks of tech. You'll get one example of astronomy, one example of big 
data, a Jobs-like popularization of existing underutilized tech, and a side 
of old timey weather blogging. Enjoy. 



BC 



March 30, 240 BC - Chinese astronomers observed a new broom-shaped 
"star" in the sky. It was the first confirmed sighting of Halley's Comet. 



June 1 9, 240 BC - Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and 
librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference. 
His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and 
simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong. 



AD 



March 11, 105 - Ts'ai Lun demonstrated his process for making paper to 
the Han emperor in China. He probably didn't invent it, but he certainly 
turned it into an industry for the first time. And the industry still survives 
20 centuries later even in the face of the computers that plot its doom. 



February 2, 1046 - English monks recorded "no man then alive could 
remember so severe a winter as this was." Their analog weather blog entry 
recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age. 



RENAISSANCE 



We're not wading in what we'd normal call technology here, but we do see 
some fun stuff. The start of patent law may be criticized by many 
software-makers, but without it I wouldn't have nearly as many dates to 
pin things on. 



You're also going to get an early calculator, the rise of scientific societies, 
and the freaking Gutenberg Bible. That one's for Jeff Jarvis. 



Fans of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle will feel sorely cheated by this 
chapter. Everyone else should get a kick out of it. 



1400s 



April 15, 1452 - Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest artist, inventor and 
engineer in history, was born near the Tuscan town of Vinci. 



August 24, 1456 — According to a handwritten note by illustrator Heinrich 
Cremer, the final binding of the Gutenberg Bible took place. 



March 19, 1474, the Venetian Senate issued a Statute on Industrial Brevets 
that is widely considered the first patent law. Patents had been issued 
before, often at the whims of monarchs, but this statute codified the 
practice and set out a standard 10-year term. 



1500s 



August 10, 1519 - Ferdinand Magellan set sail to find that pesky trade 
route that Columbus was looking for, and instead circumnavigated the 
globe. Sort of. His ship finished the trip but Magellan didn't. At least he 
would get GPS devices named after him. 



December 27, 1571 - In Well der Stadt, Wurttemberg of the then Holy 
Roman Empire, Johannes Kepler was born. His theories like the laws of 
planetary motion came in handy for Isaac Newton. 



April 22, 1592 - Wilhelm Schickard was born. He would grow up to 
create an early form of calculating machine called the "calculating clock", 
that could add and subtract up to six-digit numbers. 



1600s 



August 25, 1609 - Galileo Galilei craftily beat a Dutch telescope maker to 
an appointment with the Doge of Venice. Galileo impressed the Doge 
and received a lifetime appointment and a doubled salary. Later that 
autumn, Galileo pointed his telescope to the Moon, and trouble began. 



June 19, 1623 - Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He 
invented a digital calculator, the Pascaline, to help his father in his tax- 
collecting work. 



June 8, 1637 - Rene Descartes published "Discourse on the Method for 
Guiding One's Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences", which 
formed the basis of the modern scientific method. It's also the source of 
the quote "I think, therefore I am." 



January 4, 1642 - Sir Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe in England 
and would go on to develop describe universal gravitation and the three 
laws of motion as well as star in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. 



November 28, 1660 - 12 men, including Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, 
John Wilkins, and Sir Robert Moray met after Wren's astronomy lecture 
to discuss the formal constitution of a society of philosophers that would 
become The Royal Society. It still exists and recendy opened its archives 
on the Web. 



December 22, 1666 - Seven mathematicians and seven physicists gathered 
by Jean-Baptiste Colbert met in the king's library to found the French 
Academy of Sciences. 



June 22, 1675 - Britain's King Charles II established the observatory at 
Greenwich with the main purpose of determining precise longitudes to 
aid in navigation. This purpose led to Greenwich being marked as the 
prime meridian and later Greenwich Mean Time. 



October 29, 1675 - Gottfried Leibniz wrote the integral sign in an 
unpublished manuscript, a sign that would later haunt the nightmares of 
students and be widely misapplied on blackboards in movies. 



November 11, 1675 - Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for 
the first time to find the area under the graph of good old y=f(x). That is, 
if you believe what he wrote in his notebooks. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



Now things are starting to cook. Which means these little introductory 
paragraphs will get shorter and eventually disappear. 



There's lots of founding of the metric system here, because that's just 
how old the metric system is. Also keep your eyes peeled for other 
surprises like batteries, typewriters, and silicon valley. 



1700s 



April 10, 1710 — The Statute of Anne entered into force in Great Britain. 
The statute ended the practice of copyright being enforced by the 
Stationer's Guild under the licensing act and for the first time granted 
copyright to authors. 



January 7, 1714 - Henry Mill patented a machine for transcribing letters 
"one after another, as in writing". Sadly, he died before he perfected the 
first typewriter. 



December 25, 1741- In Uppsala, Sweden, Anders Celsius first used a 
Delisle thermometer he had marked up with 100 gradations between 
boiling and freezing. It was the first use of the centigrade scale of 
temperature. 



July 7, 1752 -Joseph Marie Jacquard was born in Lyon, France. The 
weaver and inventor created the first programmable power loom and the 
cards he used to program it would be adapted by Herman Hollerith and 
others for programming the first computers. 



January 15, 1759 - The British Museum, in Bloomsbury, London, the 
world's oldest public national museum, opened to the public. Entry was 
free and given to 'all studious and curious Persons'. 



10 



December 5, 1766 -James Christie held his first sale on Pall Mall in 
London. Christie's still operates auctions today and is much more civilised 
than EBAY. 



November 29, 1777 - California's first civilian setdement Pueblo de San 
Jose de Guadalupe was founded by the Spanish. It would become the 
future state's first capital and eventually the heart of silicon valley. 



March 13, 1781 - English astronomer William Herschel observed what he 
initially thought was a comet but turned out to be the planet Uranus. It 
was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope. 



March 12, 1790 - John Frederic Daniell was born. He would grow up to 
invent the Daniell cell, a battery that supplied an even current during 
continuous operation, thus making battery power practical. 



May 8, 1790 - The French National Assembly acted on a motion from 
Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, to create a simple, stable, decimal 
system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the 
length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The system 
eventually evolved into the metric system. 



November 17, 1790 - August Ferdinand Mobius was born in Schulpforta, 
Saxony. The mathematician, astronomer and physicist is most well 
remembered for the discovery of the Mobius strip, a 2-dimensional object 
with only one side when embedded in 3D space. Poor Johann Benedict 
Listing also discovered it at the same time but Listing strip just doesn't 
have the same ring. 



September 22, 1791 - Michael Faraday was born in south London. He 
grew up to discover electromagnetic induction and coined the terms 
'electrode', 'cathode' and 'ion.' He also lent his name to the Faraday cage. 



December 26, 1791 - At 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, 
England, (we think), Betsy and Benjamin welcomed their son Charles 
Babbage into the world. He would grow up to make a difference.... 
engine. 



11 



October 28, 1793 - Eli Whitney applied to patent his improved cotton gin, 
capable of cleaning 50 pounds of lint per day, and powering patent 
metaphors and arguments for centuries to come. 

June 22, 1799 - The first definitive prototype metre bars (metre des 
Archives) and kilograms were constructed in platinum. 



12 



NINETEENTH CENTURY - TO 1860 



This chapter will take you all the way up to the Civil War era of the 
United States. Plus we have enough entries to start breaking them up by 
decade! 



Get ready for a lot of locomotion, lighting, photography and telegraphy. 
You know, the telegraph was the Internet of the 19th century. So all my 
steampunk friends tell me. 



1800s 



March 20, 1800 - Alessandro Volta dated a letter announcing his 
invention of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal 
Society, London. We've been dealing with battery life ever since. 



March 24, 1802 - Richard Trevithick and Andrew Viviane of Camborne 
Parish in the County of Cornwall, enrolled a patent for a steam engine 
that could power a full-sized road locomotive. He had previously 
demonstrated it by driving up a hill in a car he called the "Puffing Devil". 



October 7, 1806 - Englishman Ralph Wedgwood received the first patent 
on carbon paper, which led to the initials cc to indicate a carbon copy 
which led to the email option to "cc" somebody. 



1810s 



August 3, 1811 - Elisha Otis was born. He invented a safety brake that 
prevented elevators from falling if the hoisting cable broke. Thank him 
every time you get in an elevator. 



13 



November 28, 1814 - For the first time, an automatic steam-powered 
press printed The Times in London German inventors Friedrich Koenig 
and Andreas Friedrich Bauer built the press. The Times quickly pointed 
out that they would not layoff workers, but instead increase printing, 
bringing the paper to a wider audience. 



November 2, 1815 - George Boole was born in Lincolnshire, England 
AND he became a mathematician who laid down the foundations 
Boolean logic XOR Boolean Algebra. Search engine power users 
everywhere thank him. 



December 10, 1815 - Ada Byron was born in London England to the poet 
Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke. She would later marry William 
King and take on his tide as Lady Lovelace. But she is best remembered 
as Charles Babbage's friend, and writer of the first program for his 
Difference Engine. She is considered by many to be the first computer 
programmer. 



November 25, 1816 - Gaslight illuminated Philadelphia's Chestnut Street 
Theatre, improving on an innovation pioneered in London. Instead of 
coal the gas was created from pitch, reducing the malodorous vapors 
caused by the wonder's creation. 



February 7, 1817 - The first public gas street light in the US was lit in 
Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Market and Lemon streets. 



1820s 



June 14, 1822 — Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a 
paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled "Note on the application 
of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical 
tables". 



September 17, 1822 -Jean-Francois Champollion, permanent secretary of 
the French Academie des Inscriptions, presented his Lettre a M. Dacier, 
describing his solution to the mystery of the Hieroglyphic inscriptions on 
the Rosetta Stone. A nifty bit of decryption. 



14 



May 23, 1825, William Sturgeon exhibited the electromagnet in a practical 
form for the first time. The exhibition accompanied the reading of a 
paper, recorded in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1825 (Vol 
xliii, p. 38). 

April 23, 1827 - Mathematics student William Rowan Hamilton presented 
his "Theory of Systems of Rays" at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. It 
led to the development of the wave theory of light and led to the 
development of quantum mechanics. 



1830s 



September 18, 1830 - America's first native locomotive, the "Tom 
Thumb" lost a race to a draft horse at Ellicotts Mills, Maryland. 



August 29, 1831 — Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction 
which is used in power generation and power transmission by generators, 
transformers, induction motors, electric motors, synchronous motors, and 
solenoids. 



October 19, 1832 - Samuel Morse first conceived of the electric telegraph 
system. At least he said later this was the day he first thought of it. 



June 5, 1833 - Ada Gordon, daughter of Lord Byron (and future Countess 
Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time. He designed an early 
computer, and she published a description of his work and wrote the first 
computer program. 



July 5, 1833 - Nicephore Niepce died. He created the first permanent 
photograph in 1826 -- an image of the outside of his house. 



February 25, 1837 - The US Patent Office approved Thomas Davenport's 
application for a patent on an "Improvement in Propelling Machinery by 
Magnetism and Electro-Magnetism." We'd call it an electric motor. 



15 



January 6, 1838 - Samuel Morse, with his partner, Alfred Vail, gave the 
first public demonstration of their new electric telegraphic system at the 
Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, NJ. They used Morse's specially 
designed code to send the message ""A patient waiter is no loser." 



February 18, 1838 - In the small town of Chirlitz of the Austrian Empire 
Ernst Mach was born. His work in aerodynamics and supersonic speeds, 
led to the unit of measurement that bears his name. He would die one day 
after his birthday in 1916. 



January 7, 1839 - Louis Daguerre made the first announcement of his 
photographic system at the Academie des Sciences in Paris, though details 
were not presented until August of that year. 



March 14, 1839, Sir John Herschel presented his 'Note on the Art of 
Photography, or the application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the 
purposes of Pictorial Representation' to the Royal Society, likely the first 
use of the word 'photography'. 

August 19, 1839 - At a crowded meeting of the Paris Academy of 
Sciences, Louis Daguerre demonstrated the process of making photos 
called daguerreotypes. 

December 18, 1839 -John William Draper took a daguerreotype of the 
moon, the first lunar photograph. 



1840s 



June 20, 1840 - Samuel F.B. Morse received a US patent for 
"Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by 
the application of electro-magnetism." We call it Morse code. 



October 8, 1841 - Edmund C. Berkeley, an actuary at the Prudential 
Insurance Company, wrote a report about possible applications of electro 
mechanical calculation to large commercial data-processing needs. 



16 



October 16, 1843 - Sir William Rowan Hamilton finally hit on the idea of 
Quaternions, and needing a bit more space than his hand to jot it down, 
he carved it into the stone of Brougham Bridge in Dublin. Why do you 
care about quaternions? Because calculations involving three-dimensional 
rotations are essential for 3D computer graphics and computer vision. 
Video games people. 



May 24, 1844 - Samuel Morse sent the message "What hath God 
wrought" from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States 
Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the 
first public demonstration of the telegraph. 



August 28, 1845 - Scientific American began publication with the issue for 
this day. It would become the oldest continuously published magazine in 
the United States. 



February 11,1 847 - Proud parents Samuel and Nancy welcomed their 
seventh and last child into the world. Thomas Edison would grow up to 
embody the word inventor. 



March 3, 1847 - In Edinburgh, Scodand, an expert vocal physiology and 
elocution welcomed his newborn son into the world. He was named after 
his father. Alexander Graham Bell would go on to become synonymous 
with the telephone. 



December 1, 1847 - The London and North Western Railway along with 
the Caledonian Railway adopted London Time on instructions from the 
General Post Office. Other railways followed suit and this was seen as the 
establishment of the first time zone. 



September 20, 1 848 — At noon in the library of the Academy of Natural 
Sciences in Philadelphia, members of the former Association of American 
Geologists and Naturalists met to create the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science. 



17 



1850s 



February 5, 1850 - The first US patent for push-key operation of a 
calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, N.Y. 



March 27, 1850 - San Jose was incorporated as one of the first cities in 
California and was the site of the first state capital. It would lose the 
capital to Vallejo in 1852 but eventually become the center of Silicon 
Valley and the de facto capital of the technology world. 



January 6, 1851 - Leon Foucault proved the rotation of the Earth 
experimentally by. He wrote in his journal that he made the discovery at 
2:00 am working with his famous pendulum in the cellar of his house. 



November 13, 1851 - The first public message was sent on the submarine 
telegraph cable under the English Channel between Dover, England and 
Calais, France. 



August 23, 1852 - The first time signals were transmitted by telegraph 
from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. 



July 12, 1854 - George Eastman was born to Maria Kilbourn and George 
Washington Eastman in Waterville, New York. He went on to found the 
Eastman Kodak Company and invented the roll of film. 



February 19, 1856 - Professor Hamilton L. Smith of Gambier, Ohio 
received the first US patent for the tintype photographic picture process. 
It described a method for "the obtaining of positive impressions upon a 
japanned surface previously prepared upon an iron or other metallic or 
mineral sheet or plate by means of collodion and a solution of a salt of 
silver." 



July 10, 1856 - Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Lika, Croatia, which was 
then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a Serbian 
Orthodox Priest and his mother an inventor of household appliances. 



18 



February 22, 1857 - Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born in Hamburg, 
Germany. Hertz made key discoveries in optics but also transmitted and 
received electromagnetic waves and gave his name to the common unit of 
frequency, Hz. 



March 23, 1857 - The first department store elevator for passengers was 
installed at E.V. Haughwout & Co. in New York City. This was a 
significant development towards the building of skyscrapers. 



May 19, 1857 - William Francis Channing of Boston, Mass. and Moses 
Gerrish Farmer, of Salem, Mass. received the first US patent for an 
"electromagnetic fire alarm telegraph for cities" (No. 17,355). 



July 28, 1858 - The first use of fingerprints as identification took place in 
India. William James Herschel, magistrate of Nuddea, India requested 
local businessman Rajyadhar Konai make a handprint on the back of a 
contract. Herschel wanted to "frighten [Konai] out of all thought of 
repudiating his signature." 



August 5, 1858 - The west end of the first transatlantic cable was 
completed when the ship Niagara anchored at the Newfoundland coast 
having laid 1,016 miles of telegraph cable. 



August 9, 1859 - US Patent no. 25,076 was issued to Nathan Ames of 
Saugus, Mass. for the first escalator-type moving staircase. 



September 2, 1859 - A unique combination of solar events including a 
magnetic explosion severely affected the young telegraph network in 
North America and Europe. Wires shorted out, fires started and some 
machines reportedly worked even when disconnected from batteries. 



1860s 



February 29, 1860 - Herman Hollerith was born. He would grow up to 
build the first punched-card tabulating machines as well as found the 
company that was to become IBM. 



19 



April 9, 1860 - Parisian typesetter and inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de 
Martinville's uses his Phonoautogram to record sound onto paper but has 
no way to pay it back. 



October 8, 1860 - Telegraph lines opened between Los Angeles and San 
Francisco. This allowed gold miners to tell backers farther south that they 
still hadn't found any gold. 



October 24, 1861 - The First Transcontinental Telegraph line across the 
United States was completed, ending the need for the Pony Express 
which had only been around for a year and a half. Pony unemployment 
skyrocketed. 



September 21, 1866 - Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, 
England. He would grow up to write under the name H. G. Wells and 
help form the genre of science fiction. 



July 14, 1867 - Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite for the first time at 
Merstham Quarry, Surrey. 



20 



NINETEENTH CENTURY - 1870 ON 



Edison sort of dominates this section. Believe me, it could have been 
worse. He was a patent-tiling machine. In fact I'm almost certain he had a 
patent on a patent-filing machine. 



Co-starring in this chapter is Alexander Graham Bell. You'll also get the 
first glimmerings of television and automobiles. Radio is still called 
wireless telegraphy at this point, but don't let that fool you. 



1870 



February 9, 1870 - US President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill authorizing 
"The Secretary of War to take observations at military stations and to 
warn of storms on the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts." 
This agency operating under the Signal Service eventually became the 
National Weather Service. 



August 2, 1870 - The world's first underground tube railway, (the Met had 
been the first underground non-tube railway) Tower Subway, opened in 
London, running from Lower Thames street to Vine Street. It closed after 
4 months of operation. 



November 1, 1870 - The United States Weather Bureau, now known as 
the National Weather Service, made its first weather report. 24 observers 
sent reports by telegram to Washington DC. 



November 8, 1870 - The US Weather Bureau (someday to become the 
National Weather Service) issued its first weather warning for a storm on 
the Great Lakes. It was accurate, but there was no high-pitched beep yet. 



21 



1871 



January 17, 1871 - Andrew S. Hallidie received a patent for an "endless 
wire rope way" which he would put into practice as the cable car system 
in San Francisco, California. 



1872 



November 19, 1872 - E.D. Barbour of Boston, Mass. received the first 
US patent for an adding machine capable of printing totals and subtotals. 
The so-called "calculating machine," proved impractical. 



1873 



August 1, 1873 - Andrew Smith Hallidie took his San Francisco cable car 
for its first test run. The tracks ran from Clay and Kearny Streets for 2800 
feet to a hill 307 feet above. 



December 30, 1873 - A number of gendemen in New York City founded 
the American Metrological Society, feeling that a change to the Metric 
System was needed by civilized nations. 100 years later their defunct and 
gallons, miles, and Fahrenheit rule the US. 



1874 



July 24, 1874 - Woodward and Evans Light filed a patent for Artificial 
light by means of Electricity with the Canadian Department of 
Agriculture. Woodward later sold the patent to Thomas Edison, who 
patented a different and more successful version of the incandescent lamp 
in the US. 



22 



1875 



May 20, 1875 - 17 nations (including the US) signed the 'Convention du 
Metre' in Paris, France, establishing the International Bureau of Weights 
and Measures. 



1876 



March 7, 1876 - Alexander Graham Bell received a US patent for an 
"Improvement in Telegraphy" (No.l 74,465) which established the 
principle of bidirectional signals that made the telephone possible. 



March 10, 1876 - Alexander Graham Bell spoke the immortal words "Mr. 
Watson, come here. I want you." over the a telephone in his Boston 
laboratory, summoning his assistant from the next room. It is widely 
considered the first instance of someone using technology when they 
bloody well could have just got up and spoke to someone in person. It is 
also widely considered the first phone call. 



August 8, 1876 - Thomas Edison received a US patent for a mimeograph, 
which combined with an invention by A. B. Dick led to the first widely 
successful mimeograph machine. 



October 9, 1876 - The first two-way telephone conversation occurred 
over outdoor wires between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, 
Watson. They used a two-mile telegraph line linking Boston and East 
Cambridge. 



1877 



February 12, 1877 - Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone 
for the first time in public at the Salem Lyceum Hall. The demonstration 
ended with the sending of the first telephone news dispatch which was 
received by the Boston Globe. 



23 



August 12, 1877 - Thomas Edison sketched his idea for the phonograph, 
and may have even completed a model. The first working model wasn't 
completed until December 6. 



August 15, 1877 - In a letter to T.BA. David, president of the Central 
District and Printing Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh, Thomas Edison 
suggested using the word 'hello' to indicate a telephone connection was 
active. Alexander Graham Bell had reportedly preferred Ahoy' as the 
greeting. 



November 21, 1877 - Thomas Edison announced his invention of the 
phonograph, a machine that could record and play sound. 



December 6, 1877 - Thomas Edison tested out his new invention, the 
phonograph, be recording the first lines of the poem "Mary Had a Litde 
Lamb" He recreated the event in 1927. 



1878 



January 14, 1878 - Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone to 
Queen Victoria at her Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight. He 
reached out and touched her, a faux pas which made him the first 
commoner in years to lay hands on the royal person. 



January 28, 1878 - The first commercial telephone exchange in the US was 
installed at New Haven, Connecticut, and served 21 subscribers 
connected by a single strand of iron wire. Only two conversations could 
be handled simultaneously and six connections had to be made for each 
call. 



February 19, 1878 - Thomas Edison received a US patent (No. 200521) 
for the phonograph. His first recording was of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" 
spoken into a large horn which transmitted vibrations to a needle that cut 
the recording on a hand-rotated cylinder. 



24 



June 15, 1878 - Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed 
photography to capture a horse's motion. The photos showed the horse 
with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion 
photography was born. 



October 15, 1878 - The Edison Electric Light Company began operation. 
They would go on to become more general. As in making up a significant 
part of General Electric. 



December 18, 1878 -Joseph Swan demonstrated the electric lamp to the 
Newcasde Chemical Society in northern England. His bulb would burn 
for about 40 hours. Edison's later bulb would burn for closer to 150 
hours. 



1879 



February 3, 1879 - The first practically usable incandescent filament 
electric light bulb was demonstrated to 700 people by Joseph Wilson 
Swan at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcasde upon Tyne. 



March 14, 1879 - Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in Wiirttemberg, 
Germany. He would grow up to work in the Swiss patent office. And 
reinvent physics. 



October 21, 1879 - Thomas Edison finished up 14 months of testing with 
an incandescent electric light bulb that lasted 13Y2 hours. It improved on 
50-year-old technology to make light bulbs safe and economical by using 
lower electricity, a carbon filament and an improved vacuum. 



November 4, 1879 -James Jacob Ritty patents the first cash register as 
"Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier". He was motivated to invent it by the no 
good thieving employees at his saloon. 



25 



1880 



February 16, 1880 - 30 engineers from eight states met in the New York 
editorial offices of the American Machinist to found the American Society 
of Mechanical Engineers. 



August 2, 1880 - Parliament officially adopted Greenwich Mean Time 
(GMT) as the official time of Great Britain. 



December 17, 1880 - The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New 
York was incorporated to install a central generating station in New York 
City. New Yorkers know it now as ConEd. 



December 20, 1880 - New York's Broadway from 14th to 26th street was 
first lighted by electricity and became known as the "Great White Way." 



1881 



January 25, 1881 - Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell from the 
Oriental Telephone Company in agreement with the Anglo-Indian 
Telephone COmpany Ltd.. The company was licensed to sell telephones 
in Greece, Turkey, South Africa, India, Japan, China and several other 
Asian countries. 



1882 



January 17, 1882 - Thomas Edison received a patent for adding a carbon 
microphone to the telephone. The patent described finely divided 
conducting material, like carbon, between metal cups mounted on arms 
that attached to the mouthpiece diaphragm. 



March 13, 1882 - At the Royal Institution, Eadweard J. Muybridge 
demonstrated his zoopraxiscope, an optical apparatus that exhibited 
photographs of moving animals. It is sometimes considered the first 
movie projector. 



26 



April 29, 1882 - Ernst Werner von Siemens presented his "trackless 
trolley" called the Elektromote in a Berlin suburb. The system pulled 
electricity from overhead wires, but used road wheels instead of tracks. 



September 30, 1882 — Thomas Edison's first commercial hydroelectric 
power plant began operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, 
United States. 



December 22, 1882 - Edward H.Johnson of the Edison Illumination 
Company strung a single power cord with red white and blue lights on his 
Christmas tree becoming the first person to use Christmas tree lights. 



1883 



January 19, 1883 -The first electric lighting system using overhead wires 
went into service in Roselle, New Jersey. 



June 2, 1883 - Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built built the 
world's first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide 
track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the 
Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour. 



November 18, 1883 - US and Canadian railways adopt five standardized 
time zones to replace the multitude of local times scattered across North 
America. It was called "The Day of Two Noons" as each railroad station 
clock was reset as standard-time noon was reached within each time zone. 



1884 



March 27, 1884 - Bell and Watson experimented with a line of two twelve 
gauge hard-drawn copper wires connecting Boston and New York City. 
The line worked for about ninety minutes before finally failing. 



27 



April 26, 1884 - The New York Times reported that "sending mails by 
electricity" was to be investigated by the Post Office Committee of the 
US House, by providing for contracts with an existing telegraph company. 
It could lead to 10 cent telegrams! 



May 1, 1884 - Construction began in Chicago on the Home Insurance 
Building, generally acknowledged as the first steel-frame high-rise 
skyscraper. 



May 13, 1 884 - A group of people interested in the new field of electricity 
met in New York to start the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. 



October 13, 1884 - Geographers and astronomers adopted Greenwich as 
the Prime Meridian, making it the International standard for zero degrees 
longitude. Today the Greenwich observatory shoots a laser northwards at 
night to indicate the meridian. It is not a dangerous laser. 



October 14, 1884 - US inventor George Eastman received a patent on his 
new paper-strip photographic film. It would reign for over 100 years until 
digital stole its thunder. 



1885 



March 3, 1885 - The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was 
incorporated in New York State as a subsidiary of American Bell 
Telephone. 



August 30, 1885 - Gotdieb Daimler received a patent for adding an 
internal combustion engine to a bicycle to make the first gasoline-driven 
motorcycle. 



December 22, 1885 - A patent for a gravity switchback railway was issued 
to La Marcus Thompson of Coney Island, NY. You and I might call it a 
"roller coaster" 



2>i 



1886 



January 29, 1886 - Karl Benz submitted a patent for his Benz Patent 
Motorwagen, a three-wheeler vehicle with a one-cylinder four-stroke 
gasoline engine. The world's first patent for a practical internal 
combustion engine powered automobile. Previous automobiles had been 
steam-powered. 



March 6, 1886 - The first alternating current power plant in the US was 
put into regular operation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. 



March 20, 1886 - The first alternating current power plant in the United 
States began providing power to Main Street in Great Barrington, Mass. 



July 3, 1886 - Karl Benz drove his Patent Motor Wagen on Mannheim's 
RingstraBe, reaching a top speed of 16 km/h (10 mph) powered by a 0.75- 
hp one-cylinder four-stroke gasoline engine. It was the first public drive of 
what is considered the first purpose-built automobile. 



December 28, 1886 -Josephine Garis Cochrane of Shelbyville, Illinois 
received the first US patent for a commercially successful dishwasher. 
Dishes fit in compartments in a wheel that turned inside a copper boiler. 
Her company eventually became KitchenAid. 



1887 



May 2, 1887 - 65-year-old Rev. Hannibal Goodwin takes his 
nitrocellulose flexible film out of his attic laboratory and into the patent 
rolls. He beat the Eastman Kodak company by two years, but his 
vaguely-worded patent led to a 27-year legal battle. 



November 8, 1887 - German immigrant Emile Berliner patented a 
successful system of sound recording that used flat disks instead of 
cylinders. The first versions were made of glass. Talk about your broken 
records. 



29 



1888 



May 16, 1888 - Emile Berliner demonstrated his flat disc recording and 
reproduction in a lecture he gave to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, 
which was printed in the institute's Journal (vol. 125, no. 60). 



August 13, 1888 -John Logie Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scodand. 
He would grow up to invent the first working television system in the 
world. 



August 14, 1888 — Mr. George Gouraud introduced the Edison 
phonograph to London in a press conference, including the playing of a 
piano and cornet recording of Sullivan's "The Lost Chord," one of the 
first recordings of music ever made. 



August 21, 1888 - William Seward Burroughs received four patents, 
including one for a 'Calculating Machine'. It would lead to the creation of 
the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. 



September 4, 1888 - George Eastman was issued US patent No. 388,850 
for his roll-film box camera. 



October 17, 1888 - Thomas Edison filed a patent for something called an 
optical phonograph. Despite the conflicting name, it was a film camera 
with images l/32nd of an inch wide. He said it would "do for the eye 
what the phonograph does for the ear." 



1889 



January 8, 1889 - Herman Hollerith received a patent for his electronic 
tabulating machine. His Tabulating Machine Company would go on to 
merge with three others and be called International Business Machines 
known today as IBM. 



March 12, 1889 - Almon B. Strowger of Kansas City filed his patent for 
the first automatic telephone exchange. 



30 



June 3, 1889 - The first long-distance transmission of electricity took 
place, sending power from a hydroelectric generator at Willamette Falls 14 
miles west to 55 street lights at 4th and Main in Pordand, Oregon. 



July 30, 1889 - Vladimir Zworykin was born in Russia. He would go on to 
earn the title "Father of Television" (one of several called that) for his 
work on the iconoscope and the kinescope. He worked on television for 
RCA. 



September 23, 1889 - Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in 
Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture hanafuda, Japanese playing cards. Mario 
came much later. 



November 23, 1889 - The installed its "nickel-in-the-slot player" at the 
Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. The first jukebox. Up to four 
people could put in a coin, put on earphones and listen to a record playing 
on an Edison Class M phonograph. 



1890 



February 4, 1890 - Thomas Edison received a patent for the first 
quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in 
each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying 
strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity. 



June 1, 1890 - The US Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith's 
tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later 
found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four 
companies that merged to form IBM. 



1891 



February 27, 1891 - David Sarnoff was born near Minsk.. He would go on 
to befriend Marconi, rise to the Presidency of RCA, and be integral in 
founding NBC. 



31 



March 10, 1891 - Almon B. Strowger was issued a US patent for his 
electromechanical switch to automate a telephone exchange. Strowger 
wasn't the first to think of of automatic switching but he was the first to 
make a practical switch. 



May 20, 1891 - The first public demonstration of a prototype 
Kinetoscope was given at Edison's laboratory for approximately 150 
members of the National Federation of Women's Clubs. The New York 
Sun reported on the demonstration. 



1892 



April 15, 1892 — The Edison General Electric Company and the 
Thomson-Houston Company merge to form the General Electric 
Company, manufacturer of dynamos and electric lights. 



1893 



February 23, 1893 - Germany's Imperial Patent Office granted Rudolph 
Diesel Patent No. 67207 for "a new efficient thermal engine". We just call 
it, the Diesel engine. 



May 9, 1893 - Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the Kinetoscope for 
the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. 



October 6, 1893 - US copyright was issued to William K. L. Dickson for a 
"publication" consisting of "Edison Kinetoscopic Records." It was the 
first motion picture copyright in North America. No torrents were 
uploaded until much later. 



32 



1894 



April 14, 1894 - Alfred Tate, a former Edison associate and the Holland 
Brothers, opened a public Kinetoscope in New York City at 1155 
Broadway, on the corner of 27th Street — the first commercial motion 
picture house. 



August 14, 1894 - The first wireless transmission of information using 
Morse code was demonstrated by Oliver Lodge during a meeting of the 
British Association at Oxford. A message was transmitted about 50 
meters from the old Clarendon Laboratory to the lecture theater of the 
University Museum. 



November 26, 1894 - Norbert Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri. 
He would get his BA in mathematics at age 14 but is most remembered 
for his theory of regulation and of signal transmission which he called 
"cybernetics" 



1895 



January 29, 1895 - Charles Proteus Steinmetz received a patent for a 
"system of distribution by alternating currents." His engineering work 
made a widespread power grid practical. 



February 13, 1895 - French patent No. 245,032 was filed for appareil 
servant a l'obtention et a la vision des epreuves chrono-photographiques, 
AKA the Cinematographe, a combined motion-picture camera and 
projector. 



March 22, 1895 - The Lumiere brothers showed their first film to an 
audience. It was a romantic comedy about a crowd of mosdy women 
leaving a building. 



May 7, 1895 - The first demonstration of A A Popov's electromagnetic 
wave receiver took place at a meeting of the Russian Physical Chemical 
Society in St.- Petersburg. It was essential to the development of wireless 
communications. 



33 



May 7, 1895 - Otto Steiger received a patent for the Millionaire calculating 
machine. Switzerland's Hans Egli made 4,700 of the 120-pound things. 
The Millionaire's chief feature was the ability to do direct multiplication 
with a single rotation of the handle. 



November 5, 1895 - The US Patent office granted George B. Selden the 
US patent for his road engine, often considered the first car. He made 
good money licensing the patent, until Henry Ford crushed him in court. 
Hence the reason none of us drive Seldens. 



November 8, 1895 - German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, working in his 
lab in Wurzburg noticed a strange effect while studying vacuum tubes 
covered in black cardboard. He eventually saw his own skeleton and went 
on to publish a paper "ON a new kind of rays" that would end up being 
called X-Rays. 



December 28, 1895 - The first commercial presentation of the famous 
Lumiere Cinematographe took place at the Salon Indien of the Grand 
Cafe in Paris. Invited payees got ten film. 



1896 



January 23, 1896 - Wilhelm Roentgen spoke to the Wurzburg Physical 
Medical Society where he demonstrated X-rays by photographing the 
hand of session chair Dr. Albert von Kolliker, a famous anatomist. 



February 26, 1896 - Hoping to test the suns ability to create X-rays. Henri 
Becquerel placed a wrapped photographic plate in a closed desk drawer, 
with a phosphorescent uranium rocks laid on top. He left it in the drawer 
for several days until the sun came out. 



March 1, 1896 - Henri Becquerel discovered images of uranium rocks had 
appeared on a photographic plate without exposure to the sun. He had 
discovered natural radiation. 



34 



March 24, 1896 — A. S. Popov supposedly made the first radio 
transmission in human history. Popov is said to have transmitted the 
words "Heinrich Hertz" from one building to another on the campus of 
St. Petersburg University, though the assertion was not published until 
years later because of the need for military secrecy. 



May 6, 1896 - Samuel Pierpoint Langley's Aerodrome No. 5 made the first 
successful flight of an unpiloted, engine- driven, heavier-than-air craft of 
substantial size. 



June 2, 1896 — Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 
12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We'd call it 
radio. 



December 12, 1896 - Guglielmo Marconi amazed a group at Toynbee 
Hall in East London with a demonstration of wireless communication 
across a room. Every time Marconi hit a key a bell would ring from a box 
across the room being carried by William Henry Preece. 



1897 



February 15, 1897 - Ferdinand Braun published a paper in the journal 
Annalen der Physik und Chemie describing his "Braun tube", the first 
cathode-ray oscilloscope, which paved the way for the modern CRT. 



June 12, 1897 - Karl Elsener legally registered his "soldiers' knife" for use 
by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a 
screwdriver and a can opener. 



July 2, 1897 — 23-year-old Guglielmo Marconi received a patent in 
England for his wireless telegraphy which we now call radio. The Wireless 
Telegraph and Signal Co. Ltd. was formed a few weeks later. 



August 31, 1897 — Thomas Edison received a patent for the kinetographic 
camera, the forerunner of the motion picture film projector. 



35 



1898 



July 30, 1898 - The Winton Motor Carriage Company placed a magazine 
advertisement in Scientific American calling on readers to "dispense with 
a horse." It's the earliest known automobile ad. 



December 21, 1898 - Building on Henri Becquerel's discovery of 
spontaneous radioactivity two years earlier the husband-and-wife team of 
Pierre and Marie Curie discovered Radium. Marie particularly figured out 
how to separate it from its radioactive residues. 



1899 



January 10, 1899 - A US patent was issued for an "Electric Device," 
invented by David Misell, which used D size batteries laid end to end in a 
paper tube with a light bulb and a brass reflector at the end. The batteries 
only lasted long enough for a "flash" of light, hence the name Flashlight. 



March 27, 1899 - Guglielmo Marconi made the first wireless transmission 
from France to England. A message was sent 32 miles from Wimereaux 
near Boulogne, France, to the South Foreland lighthouse near Dover, 
England. This became an important alternative to laying undersea cables 
for telegraphy. 



July 17, 1899 - Nippon Electric Company Ltd. (NEC) was founded by 
Iwadare Kunihiko, an expert in telegraphic systems who worked under 
Thomas Edison. Western Electric provided funding, making it the first 
Japanese joint-venture with a foreign company. 



36 



TWENTIETH CENTURY 



You gotta love a decade that begins with a Haitian getting a patent for an 
airship and ends with color motion pictures that would take 50 years to 
become common. There are also some really good births in this decade. 



1900 



February 20, 1900 - John F. Pickering of Haiti received a US patent for 
his design of an air ship. 



December 14, 1900 - German physicist Max Planck published his theory 
that radiant energy is made up of particle-like components, known as 
"quantum." And quantum physics was born. 



1901 



January 9, 1901 - The first application for a patent for Meccano was 
submitted. Known at first as "Mechanics Made Easy," this invention of 
Frank Hornby became a worldwide success and is sold in the US under 
the name "Erector Set." 



January 29, 1901 - In Brooklyn, Allen B. DuMont was born. He would go 
on to perfect the cathode ray tube, sell the first practical commercial 
television and found the first national US TV network to fail. It was 
eventually sold to Fox Television Stations. 

December 5, 1901 - At 2156 Tripp Avenue in Chicago, Elias and Flora 
welcomed their new baby boy into the world. They had no idea at the 
time that Mickey Mouse had also come into the world along with their 
son, Walt Disney. 



37 



December 5, 1901 - Physicist Werner Heisenberg was born. We may not 
know both his precise position and precise momentum at the same time, 
but we are certain he was born in Wurzburg, Germany. 



1902 



January 18, 1902 - Nikola Tesla filed a patent application for wireless 
energy transmission. The patent was granted 12 years later. We're still 
waiting for the kinks to get worked out. 



May 17, 1902 - A strange device was discovered near Antikythera off the 
coast of Greece. The device is later found to be a sophisticated calculating 
mechanism dating from 150 BC. 



June 9, 1902 -Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first US Automat 
at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia. The waiterless restaurant charged a 
nickel for most dishes. 



August 2, 1902 - Mina Spiegel Rees was born in Ohio, and became one of 
the earliest female computer pioneers. She ran the Office of Naval 
Research, where she organized work on early computers like the Harvard 
Mark I. 



September 1, 1902 -Georges Melies' Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the 
Moon) debuted in France. It is often considered the first real science 
fiction film. 



1903 



January 18, 1903 - The first two-way transatlantic communication, and 
first wireless telegram was sent between North America and Europe. US 
President Teddy Roosevelt and King Edward VII. They wrote to each 
other how awesome the wireless telegraph was. 



June 4, 1903 - In one of the earliest examples of white hat hacking, Nevil 
Maskelyne interrupted a demonstration of the Marconi radio 



38 



communications system at the Royal Institution, London. Before 
Marconi's message from Poldhu, Cornwall could arrive, Maskelyne 
hijacked the signal sending the word "rast" repeatedly and then the 
phrases, "There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite 
prettily." 



July 23, 1903 - Ford sells its first car to Dr. Ernst Pfenning of Chicago. 
The two-cylinder Model A was assembled at Mack Avenue Plant in 
Detroit. 



December 17, 1903 - Orville Wright successfully made a flight in a 
heavier-than-air machine that took off from level ground under its own 
power and was controlled during flight. It's generally considered the first 
airplane flight. 



1904 



October 27, 1904 - The first underground New York City subway line 
opened. The line ran from City Hall in lower Manhattan through Grand 
Central, Times Square and ended north in Harlem. Rides cost five cents. 



November 16, 1904 - Sir John Ambrose Fleming went "scudding down 
Gower Street" in London on his way to patenting the "oscillation valve" 
which we fondly call the Vacuum Tube. His patent was later invalidated 
by the US supreme court, but that didn't stop Fleming from being 
Knighted and receiving a medal of honor from the Institute of Radio 
Engineers. 



1905 



March 28, 1905 - Cornelius Ehret of Rosemont, Pennsylvania received a 
patent for the "Art of Transmitting Intelligence." It was the forerunner of 
the modern fax. 



39 



May 15, 1905 — 110 acres of land in southern Nevada are auctioned off, 
founding a new city. They would become downtown Las Vegas which 
would grow to become the host for major tech events like Comdex, CES 
and more. 



November 21, 1905 — The Annalen Der Physik published Albert 
Einstein's paper, entitled "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its 
Energy Content?" The paper revealed the relationship between energy 
and mass. You know the relationship as E = mc 2 . 



1906 



August 19, 1906 - Philo Farnsworth was born on INdian Creek in Beaver 
County, Utah. He would grow up to inspire the beloved professor 
character on Futurama. He also gets credit for Inventing the first 
completely electronic television. 



October 23, 1906 - Alberto Santos-Dumont flew an airplane in the first 
heavier-than-air flight in Europe at Champs de Bagatelle, Paris, France. 
Some argue he should be credited with the first flight at all. But that's a 
long controversy. 



December 9, 1906 - Grace Hopper was born. She would rise to the rank 
of Rear Admiral but be best remembered for popularizing the term 
"debugging" for hunting down computer errors. She conceptualized the 
idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the 
development of COBOL. 



1907 



October 17, 1907 Guglielmo Marconi's company began the first wireless 
commercial radio service, and Canada got some tech first. Glace Bay 
Nova Scotia was able to transmit to Clifden, Ireland. The service was used 
for trans-atiantic telegraph service. 



40 



1908 



January 12, 1908 - Lee de Forest, a French engineer and scientist, 
broadcast a phonograph record show from the Eiffel Tower for an 
audience of less than 50 people. The show was also heard over 500 miles 
from the tower, becoming the first long-distance radio message 
transmission. 



February 18, 1908 - Dr Lee de Forest received a patent for "Space 
Telegraphy" which described a three-element vacuum tube later called the 
triode which could amplify feeble electric currents, and proved especially 
useful for radio reception. 



March 2, 1908 - Gabriel Lippman proposed using a series of lenses at a 
picture's surface instead of opaque barrier lines, allowing three 
dimensional pictures. He tided his presentation to the French Academy of 
Sciences "La Photographie Integral". 



May 23, 1908 - John Bardeen was born. He grew up to become to win the 
Nobel Prize twice, once for inventing the transistor, and once for figuring 
out superconductivity. 



June 18, 1908 - Scottish electrical engineer, Alan Archibald Campbell- 
Swinton, published a brief letter in the journal Nature, describing the 
essentials of making and receiving television images. He described using 
an electron gun in the neck of a cathode-ray tube to shoot electrons 
toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting 
phosphor. Others like Farnsworth and Baird would make just such 
devices years later. 



July 8, 1908 - Charles Urban demonstrated Kinemacolor, the first 
successful color motion-picture process, at a scientific meeting in Paris 
attended by Auguste and Louis Lumiere. 



41 



August 8, 1908 - For the first time in public, Wilbur Wright showed off 
the Wright Brothers' flying machine at the racecourse in Le Mans, France. 
French doubts about the Wright Brothers' claims to flight were put to rest 
for the time being. 



1909 



February 26, 1909 — The first successful color motion picture process, 
Kinemacolor, was shown to the general public at the Palace Theatre in 
London. 



42 



THE TEENS 



Here come big advances in electric lighting and telephony that lay the 
infrastructure that tech will need. From here on out the years speak for 
themselves. We'll still divide the chapters up though so it's easier to flip 
through. Enjoy! 



1910 



January 13, 1910 - The first public radio broadcast took place with a live 
performance of the opera Cavalleria rusticana sung by Enrico Caruso and 
others was broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York 
City. The transmitter had 500 watts of power. 



July 31, 1910 - Dr. Hawley Crippen was arrested when the boat he was on 
docked in Quebec. He was the first person to be caught as a result of a 
wireless telegraph. 



November 29, 1910 - The first US patent for a traffic signal system was 
issued to Ernest E. Sirrine. It switched an illuminated sign between the 
words "stop" and "proceed" 



December 11, 1910 - Georges Claude, the first person to apply an 
electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon gas, displayed the first neon 
lamp to the public at the Paris Motor Show. 



1911 



April 5, 1911 - Cuthbert Hurd was born in Estherville, Iowa. He would 
grow up to work at IBM where he quiedy persuaded the company that a 
market for scientific computers existed. He sold 10 of the very first IBM 
701s and managed the team that invented FORTRAN. 



43 



June 16, 1911 — The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman 
Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time 
Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating- 
Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the 
company name to International Business Machines, and later just IBM. 



1912 



June 23, 1912 - Alan Turing was born in London, although his father 
worked for the Indian Civil Service and his parents lived in India. He 
helped break the code of the German enigma machine and developed the 
Turing test for artificial intelligence. 



August 13, 1912 - The US Department of Commerce issued its first 
experimental radio license in compliance with the International Radio 
Convention and Radio Act of 1912. St. Joseph's College received a license 
with serial number 1 to operate 2 kilowatts station 3XJ. 



1913 



December 1, 1913 - Henry Ford added the moving-chassis assembly line 
to produce Model T's in his Highland Park, Michigan factory. It was the 
crowning glory in his attempts to increase efficiency and production. 



December 30, 1913 - Dr William David Coolidge patent for 
improvements in tungsten and methods for making the same for use as 
filaments in incandescent lights. It made light bulbs last a lot longer. Too 
bad that in 1928, G.E. got a court to declare the patent was not an 
invention. 



1914 



August 5, 1914 - The American Traffic Signal Co. installed their first 
electric traffic light at East 105th street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, 
Ohio. 



44 



October 6, 1914 - Edwin H. Armstrong received a US patent for a 
"Wireless Receiving System" which described his famous regenerative, or 
feedback, circuit. Armstrong would go on to pioneer FM radio. 



1915 



January 25, 1915 - AT&T inaugurated transcontinental telephone service 
with a call made between New York City and San Francisco, Cal. The line 
had been completed the previous summer too early for the Panama 
Pacific Exposition. 



February 7, 1915 - The first completely successful tests of the wireless 
telephone from a moving train were conducted on Feb 7 on the 
Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad when spoken messages were 
clearly heard twenty six miles from Lounsberry to Binghamton, NY. 



1916 



March 20, 1916 — The Annalen der Physik received a paper tided 'Die 
Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitatstheorie' by Albert Einstein. "The 
Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity" changed physics and 
technology dramatically. 



April 30, 1916 - Claude Elwood Shannon was born. He is considered the 
father of information theory and is the man who coined the term 'bit' for 
the fundamental unit of both data and computation. 



1917 



April 6, 1917 - Following a declaration of war against Germany, President 
Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order closing all radio 
communication not required by the US Navy. 



45 



1918 



July 14, 1918 - Computer pioneer and MIT professor Jay Forrester was 
born on a cattle ranch in Climax, Nebraska. With Robert Everett, 
Forrester led one of the most important early computer projects, the 
Whirlwind, and developed and founded the field of system dynamics. 



1919 



April 9, 1919 - Presper Eckert was born in Philadelphia. Eckert became 
famous for his work, with John Mauchly on the ENIAC project. 



July 13, 1919 - The British airship R34 finished the first airship roundtrip 
journey across the Adantic from Scotland to Mineola, Long Island and 
back to Norfolk, England after 182 hours of flight. 



46 



THE TWENTIES 



1920 



July 6, 1920 - A US Navy F5L seaplane took off from Hampton Roads, 
Virginia, using a radio compass for the first time. The pilots located and 
flew to the Battleship Ohio about 94 miles offshore. 



August 20, 1920 - The first commercial radio station, 8MK, began 
operating in Michigan. Now, WWJ, it is owned by CBS. 



September 29, 1920 - The Joseph Home department store in Pittsburgh 
ran an advertisement in the Pittsburgh Sun, describing wireless Victrola 
music being picked up by radio. Amateur Wireless Sets were on sale for 



November 2, 1920 - KDKA in Pittsburgh started broadcasting as the first 
commercial radio station in the US. The first broadcast? Election results. 
Actual results, not projections. 



1921 



January 25, 1921 - A play called Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.) by 
Karel Capek debuts at the National Theater in Prague. It's the first 
appearance of the word robot. Spoiler alert, the robots end up killing all 
the humans but one. 



August 4, 1921 - The first facsimile was transmitted by radio across the 
Adantic Ocean using the Belinograph invented by Edouard Belin. A 
message written by C. V. Van Anda, managing editor of The New York 
Times and addressed to the Matin in Paris, was sent in seven minutes. 



47 



August 5, 1921 - The first radio broadcast of a baseball game happened 
on KDKA from Pittsburgh's Forbes Field. Harold W. Arlin announced 
the game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies. 



October 8, 1921 - KDKA radio in Pittsburgh conducted the first live 
broadcast of a football game from Forbes Field. The University of 
Pittsburgh beat West Virginia University. 



1922 



September 27, 1922 - Scientists at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory 
near Washington, D.C., demonstrated radar by showing that if a ship 
passed through a radio wave broadcast between two stations, that ship 
could be detected. 



October 18, 1922 - Six telecom companies joined to found the British 
Broadcasting Company in order to provide radio broadcasts in Britain. 
The private company was later replaced by the non-commercial British 
Broadcasting Corporation in 1927. 



November 14, 1922 - The BBC sent its first transmission from station 
2LO at Marconi House London. The first newscast was read by Arthur 
Burrows, first Director of Programmes. 



November 26, 1922 - Toll of the Sea debuted. It was the first color movie 
that didn't require a special projector, the second technicolor film ever, 
and the first in wide release. 



1923 



March 12, 1923 - Inventor Lee De Forest demonstrated The Phonofilm 
for the press. It was the first motion picture with a sound-on-film track. 



May 18, 1923 - The first patent application for the rotary-dial telephone 
was submitted in France by Antoine Barnay. 



48 



October 16, 1923 - Distributor M. J. Winkler, contracted to distribute the 
"Alice Comedies"marking the founding of the Disney Brothers Cartoon 
Studio which eventually changed its name to the Walt Disney Company, 
at Roy's suggestion. So don't expect anything after this date to ever go 
out of copyright. 



December 31, 1923 - The chimes of Big Ben were broadcast on radio for 
the first time by the BBC, beginning a new year's tradition. 



1924 



February 14, 1924 — The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company 
merged with its subsidiary and took the subsidiary's name, International 
Business Machines Corporation AKA IBM. 



December 30, 1924 - Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced that he had 
found stars in the spiral nebula Andromeda, and using Leavitt's formula 
measured them as 860,000 light years away proving Andromeda was a 
separate galaxy. He would go on to find a dozen more galaxies. 



1925 



January 30, 1925 - Doug Engelbart was born in Pordand, Oregon. He is 
most famous for his work on the first computer Mouse, but also worked 
on many other innovations involving graphical user interfaces, hypertext 
and networks. 



March 25, 1925 -John Logie Baird gave his first public demonstration of 
his 'Silhouette Television' at the Selfridges department store, Oxford 
Street, London. It was part of the stores birthday celebration. 



April 18, 1925 - The first commercial radio facsimile transmission was 
sent from San Francisco, California to New York City. It was a 
photograph showing Louis B. Mayer presenting Marion Davies with a 
gift. 



49 



June 13, 1925 - Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized 
transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person 
to demonstrate TV in the US. 



October 2, 1925, John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working 
television system. It delivered a grayscale 30-line vertically scanned image, 
at five frames per second. After a ventriloquist's dummy appeared on 
screen, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became first person 
televised in full tonal range. 



1926 



March 7, 1926 - The first successful Transadantic telephone call was 
placed between New York City and London. Transadantic service began 
the following year at $75 a minute. 



March 16, 1926 - Robert Goddard conducted his first successful launch of 
a liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts. 

April 20, 1926 — Sam Warner approves the sound-on-disc system created 
by Western Electric and creates the Vitaphone company to develop the 
process to add sound to film. 



November 15, 1926 - The National Broadcasting Company radio network 
opened with 24 stations. It was a joint creation of RCA, General Electric 
and Westinghouse. AT&T provided the spark for the network by selling 
WEAF to RCA. 



1927 



February 23, 1927 — President Calvin Coolidge signed Public Law no. 632 
establishing the Federal Radio Commission which was later replaced by 
the Federal Communications Commission. 



50 



February 23, 1927 — German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter 
to Wolfgang Pauli, describing the uncertainty principle for the first time. 
He submitted a paper on the principle for publication the following 
March. 



April 7, 1927 - The Bell System sent live TV images of Herbert Hoover, 
then the Secretary of Commerce, over telephone lines from Washington, 
D.C. to an auditorium in Manhattan. It was the first public demonstration 
in the US of long-distance television transmission. 



August 9, 1927 - Computer pioneer Marvin Minsky was born in New 
York City. Minsky grew up to become a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence 
research and wrote the book "The Society of Mind." 



September 7, 1927 — The first fully electronic television system is 
demonstrated by Philo Taylor Farnsworth in San Francisco. 



September 18, 1927 - The Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System 
went on the air with 47 radio stations. Within two years it would be sold 
and become the Columbia Broadcasting System and later simply CBS. 



October 6, 1927 - Al Jolson appeared on a movie screen in New York 
City and said for all to hear "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard 
nothin' yet." It was the first talkie. 



1928 



January 13, 1928 - Three television sets were installed by GE in homes in 
Schenectady, New York in order to demonstrate the first home television 
receiver. The picture was 1.5 inches long by 1 inch wide and 24 lines at 16 
frames per second. 



January 17, 1928 - Anatol M. Josepho received a the first US patent for a 
fully automatic photographic film developing machine. The Photomaton 
better known as a PhotoBooth in the US still survives as an app and in 
dark corners of subway stations. 



51 



February 25, 1928 - Charles Jenkins Laboratories of Washington, D.C. 
became the first holder of a television license from the US Federal Radio 
Commission. 



June 28, 1928 - Austrian Friedrich Schmiedl launched his first 
experimental rocket from a balloon 50,000 feet over Graz, Austria,. The 
rocket was not recovered, but later tests were successful leading to rocket 
delivered mail. 



July 2, 1928 W3XK, owned by the Jenkins Television Corporation, went 
on the air becoming the first television broadcasting station in the US. 



July 15, 1928 - Germany's ENIGMA machine encoded its first message. 
Cracking the EMIGMA during World War II brought together some of 
the finest minds in computer science at Bletchley Park in England. 



September 11, 1928 - Radio station WGY of General Electric made the 
first simulcast in Schenectady, New York. A play called "The Queen's 
Messenger" had audio broadcast over radio with the picture in sync over 
television at same time. 



November 6, 1928, the New York Times began flashing headlines outside 
its offices in Times Square using an electronic sign that wrapped around 
the 4th floor. And an icon was born. 



November 18, 1928 — Steamboat Willie premiered at Universal's Colony 
Theater in New York City. It was the first fully synchronized sound 
cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It was the first official 
appearance of Mickey Mouse. Happy birthday Mickey, now give us back a 
reasonable public domain date. 



1929 



January 20, 1929 -The movie In Old Arizona was released. It was the first 
full-length talking motion picture in the US to be filmed outdoors. 



52 



THE THIRTIES 



1930 



February 25, 1930 - A US patent for a photographing apparatus was 
issued to George Lewis McCarthy, who called it a Checkograph. It was 
the first bank check photographing device. 



April 18, 1930 - BBC Radio made the startling announcement that 
nothing terribly important had happened. Listeners who tuned in to hear 
the news bulletin were told, "There is no news." Piano music began 
subsequendy. 



August 20, 1930 - W2XCR began broadcasting at 2.1-2.2 mHz from 
Jersey City, New Jersey, with the first demonstration of telecasts meant 
for the home. A half-hour program, hosted by the cartoonist Harry 
Hirschfeld, was viewed on screens placed in a store in the Hotel Ansonia, 
the Hearst building, and a home at 98 Riverside Drive. 



September 3, 1930 - An experimental electric engine was put in service by 
the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad between Hoboken and 
Montclair, NJ. Thomas Edison served as engineer at the throtde. 



September 8, 1930 - The first roll of waterproof, transparent, pressure- 
sensitive tape was sold. Its brand name "Scotch" has become synonymous 
with cellophane tape. 



November 11, 1930 - Albert Einstein, yes that Albert Einstein and Leo 
Szilard received a US patent for a refrigerator that required no electricity, 
just a heat source. Electrolux bought up the patents. 



53 



1931 



February 2, 1931 - Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, 
Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schockl and St. 
Radegund, Austria. 



March 18, 1931 -Jacob Schick began marketing his second electric razor. 
His first hadn't caught on because of the bulky motor. This time the 
more practical design became a hit. 



May 27, 1931 - Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took man's first trip 
into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurised cabin attached to a 
balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet. 



June 9, 1931 - Robert Goddard received a patent for rocket-fueled aircraft 
design (US No. 1,809,271). Sadly we do not have a lot of rocket-planes in 
operation. 



December 8, 1931 - US Patent No. 1,835,031 for a "concentric 
conducting system" was awarded to Lloyd Espenschied of Kew Gardens, 
New York, and Herman A. Affel of Ridgewood, New Jersey, and assigned 
to the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Coaxial Cable had been 
patented. 



1932 



January 26, 1932 - the US Patent Office received a patent application for 
the cyclotron by Ernest Orlando Lawrence as a "Method and Apparatus 
for the Acceleration of Ions." 



February 27, 1932 - English physicist James Chadwick published a letter 
on the existence of the neutron, some say giving birth to modern nuclear 
physics. 



54 



March 19, 1932 — The Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened. It is the 
world's largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge with the top of the 
bridge standing 134 metres above the harbour. 



August 22, 1932 — The BBC began public television broadcasts. 



November 24, 1932 - The FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory 
(known then only as the Technical Crime Laboratory) officially opened in 
Washington DC. It's location was chosen because it had a sink, and its 
one employee, Agent Charles Appel had to borrow a microscope. 



1933 



June 6, 1933 - The world's first drive-in movie theater opened in 
Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system 
by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and 
aimed at a screen pinned to some trees. 



July 22, 1933 - Wiley Post returned to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, 
New York, 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes after leaving, becoming the 
fastest person to circumnavigate the Earth by air and the first to do it 
solo. 



December 26, 1933 - Edwin Armstrong received a patent for his method 
of eliminating static in a radio broadcast using frequency modulation. He 
would license out the technology but many companies would embrace 
FM radio without his permission and he spent much of his later life 
batding in court. 



1934 



January 20, 1934 - Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., the photographic and 
electronics company known today as Fujifilm, was founded in Tokyo, 
Japan. 



55 



August 19, 1934 - Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He 
would grow up to help build PDP computers and oversee the 
development of DEC's VAX series. 



November 30, 1934 - The steam locomotive Flying Scotsman became the 
first to officially exceed 100 mph. 



1935 



January 24, 1935 - Krueger's Cream Ale and Krueger's Finest Beer went 
on sale in Richmond, Virginia in cans, developed by the American Can 
Company. Cans protected beer better than translucent botdes. 



February 2, 1935 - Detective Leonarde Keeler, co-inventor of the Keeler 
polygraph, tried the lie detector on two suspected criminals in Portage, 
Wisconsin. Both suspects were convicted of assault. 



February 26, 1935 - Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated 
Radio Detection And Ranging to Air Ministry officials at Daventry, 
England. This RADAR proved quite helpful a few years later when war 
broke out. 



March 28, 1935 - Robert Goddard launched the first rocket equipped with 
gyroscopic controls near Roswell, New Mexico. The rocket reached an 
altitude of 4,800 feet and flew 13,000 feet at a speed of 550 mph. 



May 24, 1935 - General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It 
could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent 
record chart of the results. 



May 29, 1935 - Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover 
Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later after the concrete was well and 
truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam. 



56 



November 6, 1935 Edwin Armstrong presented his paper "A Method of 
Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency 
Modulation" to the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers, 
braving the skepticism of AT&T's John Renshaw Carson who wrote 
previously that FM radio had no particular advantages over AM. 



December 16, 1935 - A Time magazine article described the use of the 
pattern of capillaries in the retina as a means of identification called eye 
prints. Hello biometrics! 



April 11, 1936 - German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse filed for a 
patent for the automatic execution of calculations, and described 
combination memory, an early form of programmable memory. Zuse was 
working on what would become Germany's first computer, the Z-l. 



May 12, 1936 - University of Washington education professor August 
Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. 
While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak 
keyboard is not widely used. 



May 28, 1936 — Alan Turing submitted his paper "On Computable 
Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" for 
publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would 
be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it 
were representable as an algorithm. 



June 12, 1936 - The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began 
testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place 
from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA. 



June 17, 1936 - Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC 
headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM 
radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. "[I]f the audience of 50 
engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was 
in the same room." 



57 



July 7, 1936 - Henry F. Phillips received patents for a new kind of screw 
and the screwdriver used with it. Endless numbers of computer cases 
have been held together by it since. 



October 26, 1936 - The first electric generator went into full operation at 
Hoover Dam. About a month after President Roosevelt had dedicated the 
dam and tried to encourage people to call it the Boulder Dam. 



November 2, 1936 - BBC Television Service went on the air with the 
world's first regular "high definition" service. Back then high definition 
meant 200 lines not 1080. The channel became BBC1 in 1964. 



1937 



February 21, 1937- Waldo Waterman flew the first test flight of the 
Arrowbile, and found the aircraft easy to fly and virtually spin and stall 
proof. It is considered the first flying car to successfully fly. 



March 6, 1937 - Valentina Tereshkova was born in the Yaroslavl region of 
Russia. She would grow up to become the first woman in space and only 
woman ever to fly solo in space. 



May 21, 1937 — North Pole-1 became the first scientific research station 
to operate on the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean. The Soviet Union 
established it about 20 km from the North Pole. It operated for 9 months, 
and travelled 2,850 kilometres. 



August 18, 1937 - The first Frequency Modulation or FM radio permit 
was granted to W1XOJ, in Paxton, Massachusetts. It went on the air with 
scheduled programs in May 1939 and operated with the highest output 
power (50 kilowatts) granted previous to World War II. 



December 21, 1937 - Walt Disney's first full-length animated film, Snow 
White and the Seven Dwarfs opened in Los Angeles, California. It ran 83 
minutes. It was also the first animated film produced in color. 



58 



1938 



August 26, 1938 - A New York radio station first used the Philips -Miller 
system of tape recording on a radio broadcast. 



October 22, 1938 - Chester Carlson, tired of the exhaustive process of 
hand-copying or photographing patent paperwork, decided to make an 
easier way. On this date he produced the first electrophotographic image. 
Xerox would later make it automatic, popular, and make Carlson rich. 



October 30, 1938 - Orson Welles owned the US radio audience with his 
famous broadcast of War of the Worlds. It was correctly introduced as 
theater but those not paying attention were fooled into thinking the play 
was the real thing. 

December 31, 1938 - Cops in Indianapolis put Indiana University 
professor Rolla Harger's drunkometer to its first practical New Year's Eve 
test as a breath analyzer. Suspected tipplers blew into a balloon and the air 
was mixed with a chemical solution that turned darker the more alcohol 
was present. The drunkometer was replaced in 1958 by the more portable 
Breathalyzer. 



1939 



January 1, 1939 - In a garage in Palo Alto, California, William Hewlett and 
David Packard founded Hewlett-Packard a little company that made 
audio oscillators. And later TouchPads. 



January 22, 1939 -John Dunning's Cyclotron split the uranium atom for 
the first time at Columbia University in New York City. And the 
Manhattan Project was on. 



59 



March 31, 1939 - Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the 
Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled 
Calculator (ASCC). It weighed 5 tons and read data from paper tape and 
punch cards. 



April 30, 1939 - RCA began regularly scheduled television service in New 
York City, with a telecast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt opening the 
New York World's Fair. Programs were transmitted from mobile camera 
trucks to the main transmitter, which was connected to an aerial atop the 
Empire State Building. The broadcasting division of RCA was called the 
National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). 



May 12, 1939 - The first appropriation was made to begin construction of 
the Harvard Mark I, When completed in 1944 the Mark I became the first 
successful fully automatic computing machine. 



May 13, 1939 - Franldin Doolittle put experimental station W1XPW on 
the air, making it the first commercial FM radio station in the United 
States. The station later became WDRC-FM in Bloomfield, Connecticut. 



November 4, 1939 - Packard Motor Company exhibited the first air- 
conditioned automobile at the 40th Automobile Show in Chicago, Illinois. 



60 



THE FORTIES 



1940 



February 29, 1940 - Ernest O. Lawrence delivered his 1939 Nobel Prize in 
Physics banquet speech in Berkeley, California, instead of the usual 
Sweden, so he could keep raising funds for his cyclotron research which 
got him the prize in the first place. 



April 20, 1940 - Vladimir Zworykin and his team from RCA demonstrate 
the first electron microscope. It measured 10 feet high and weighed half a 
ton achieving a magnification of 100,000x. 



April 23, 1940 - A patent was granted to Herman Anthony for a leak- 
proof dry-cell battery. The patent was assigned to Ray-o-Vac. 



August 14, 1940 -John Atanasoff finished a paper describing the 
Atanasoff Berry Computer, or ABC, the computer he designed with 
Clifford Berry to solve simultaneous linear equations. 



September 9, 1940 - At McNutt Hall at Dartmouth College, George 
Stibitz demonstrated the first remote operation of a computer. He 
connected to his Complex Number Generator at Bell labs by telephone 
using 28-wire teletype cable. 



1941 



March 29, 1941 - 80 percent of US AM radio frequencies were reassigned 
to new channels as part of the North American Radio Broadcasting 
Agreement. 



61 



May 9, 1941 - British destroyers captured a German U-110 submarine 
south of Iceland and recovered a naval version of the highly secret cipher 
machine known as Enigma. The sub was sunk to hide its capture and the 
machine taken to Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and other 
cryptographers broke the naval code. 



May 12, 1941 - German engineer Konrad Zuse unveiled the Z3, the first 
program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the 
Zl which was the first binary digital computer. 



May 31, 1941 - Electric eye detectors were first used to measure high- 
jumping height attained. A track meet of the Schenectady, NY, 
Patrolmen's Association used equipment designed by General Electric, 
comprising of a movable light source and four electric eyes. 



June 14, 1941 -John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff in Iowa City to see 
his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who 
was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer. 



October 19, 1941 - The Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine first fed AC power 
to the electric grid on Grandpa's Knob in Castleton, Vermont, becoming 
the first wind machine to do so. The 1.25 MW turbine operated for 1100 
hours before a blade failed. 



1942 



August 11, 1942 - Hedy Markey and composer George Antheil received a 
US patent for a frequency-hopping device. The technique has led to many 
advancements in wireless technology including Wi-Fi. Markey was better 
known under her stage name of Hedy Lamarr. 



October 3, 1942 - Germany conducted the first successful test of the V- 
2/A4 rocket, launched from Test Stand VII at Peenemiinde. It traveled 
118 miles. 



62 



December 2, 1942 - Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and their colleagues 
achieved a successful nuclear fission chain reaction in a squash court 
underneath the football grandstand of the University of Chicago's Stagg 
Field. The atomic age had begun. 



December 10, 1942 - Germany conducted the first powered test flight of 
a V-l Rocket, launched from beneath an Fw-200. 



1943 



April 10, 1943 - Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania began work 
on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer known as ENIAC. 
The machine that was synonymous for years with computer, could 
perform 5,000 additions per second. 



May 17, 1943 - The US Army and the University of Pennsylvania signed a 
contract to further develop ENIAC. It was planned to use vacuum tubes 
and calculate ballistic firing tables. 



May 31, 1943 - Chief consultant John Mauchly and chief engineer John 
Presper Eckert began leading the military commission on the new 
computer ENIAC. They would take one year to design the computer and 
18 months to build it. 



June 10, 1943 - Hungarians Laszlo and Georg Biro, while living in 
Argentina, patented the first successful implementation of the ballpoint 
pen. 

June 23, 1943- Vint Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He 
grew up to become known as one of the fathers of the Internet, most 
famously for his co-creation of the protocols underlying TCP/IP. 



August 6, 1943 - Jon Postel was born in Altadena, California. He created 
the Internet's address system, and administered it for 30 years as director 
of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). 



63 



1944 



April 17, 1944 - Harvard University President James Conant wrote to 
IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. to let him know that the Harvard Mark 
I was operating smoothly. It was used in conjunction with the US Navy 
Bureau of Ships. 



April 25, 1944 - Lt. Carter Harman of the 1st Air Commando Group 
rescued four men from the jungle in Burma Flying a Sikorsky YR-4 
helicopter. It was the first combat rescue by helicopters in the US Army 
Air Forces. 



June 1, 1944 - The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park 
in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy. 



June 13, 1944 - Germany launched the first guided missile attack in 
history, sending V-l rockets into London. 



August 7, 1944 - IBM officially presented the Mark I computer, also 
known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or ASCC, 
to Harvard. The computer produced reliable results and ran continuously. 



August 17, 1944 - Larry Ellison was born in the Bronx in New York City. 
9 months later after contracting pneumonia he was taken to Chicago to be 
raised by his Aunt and Uncle. He would grow up to drop out of college, 
move to Berkeley and co-found Software Development Labs, one of the 
most successful corporations in history. Today it's known as Oracle. 



December 10, 1944 - Paul Odet died. His theories presciendy described a 
global interlinked "web" of documents, presaging the World Wide Web 
almost 50 years before its invention. 



64 



1945 



March 29, 1945 - German soldiers blew up the launch tracks for the V-l 
rocket site near Letelle, Netherlands, ending the rocket attacks. 



May 25, 1945 - Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his 
paper ""The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications" which suggested 
geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television 
broadcasts. 



June 30, 1945 - The first draft of a Report on the ED VAC, was published. 
It discussed the advantages of using just one large internal memory, in 
which instructions as well as data could be held. 



July 16, 1945 - The United States detonated a plutonium-based test 
nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New 
Mexico. The Trinity test ushered in the atomic age. 



October 30, 1945 - The first conference on Digital Computer Technique 
was held at MIT. The National Research Council, Subcommittee Z on 
Calculating Machines and Computation sponsored the conference. 



1946 



February 13, 1946 - ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and 
Calculator) the first practical, all-electronic computer was unveiled at the 
University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electronics. The New York 
Times carried the report the next day. 



February 15, 1946 A few days after its first public demonstration, the first 
practical all-digital computer, ENIAC was formally dedicated. 



May 10, 1946 - The US launched its second V-2 rocket at White Sands 
Proving Ground, which became the first successful launch of a large 



65 



rocket on US soil. The rocket climbed straight up then pitched to the 
north reaching an altitude of 71 miles and impacted about 35 miles 
uprange. 



May 16, 1946 - At the meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, 
now IEEE) in San Francisco, Jack Mullin demonstrated the world's first 
professional-quality tape recorded in the US. 



June 17,1 946 - The first mobile telephone call was made from a car in St. 
Louis, Missouri. 



July 8, 1946 - The University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical 
Engineering began summer school course on computing that inspired the 
EDSAC, BINAC, and, many other similar computers. 



November 12, 1946 - The US Army held a contest between an abacus 
used by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki from Japan's postal ministry and an electric 
calculator operated by Private Thomas Nathan Wood. The abacus won 4 
tol. 



1947 



February 21, 1947 - Edwin H. Land demonstrated his one-step instant 
camera and film at a meeting of the Optical Society of America. The first 
Polaroid camera was on sale within two years. 



February 28, 1947 - The first closed-circuit broadcast of a surgical 
operation showed procedures to observers in classrooms at Johns 
Hopkins University. 



April 19, 1947 - A report appeared in Billboard magazine of the first 
public demonstration of the Jerry Fairbanks Zoomarlens. The National 
Broadcasting Company in New York City conducted the demo and the 
zoom lens soon became standard TV equipment. 



66 



July 6, 1947 - The AK-47 went into production in the Soviet Union — the 
name stands for Automatic rifle Kalashnikov model of 1947. 



July 29, 1947 - ENIAC was switched on after being transferred to the 
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. It operated continuously until 
October 2 1955. 



August 18, 1947 - Eight years after William Hewlett and David Packard 
founded it, Hewlett-Packard was officially incorporated. 



September 6, 1947 - The aircraft-carrier Midway became the first US 
vessel from which a long-range rocket was launched. The rocket had a 
mishap though, and exploded at 5,000 feet. 



September 9, 1947 - While troubleshooting the Harvard University Mark 
II Aiken Relay Calculator, operators found a moth trapped between the 
points of relay #70 in Panel F. They affixed the bug to the log and wrote 
"First actual case of bug being found." While this was not the first use of 
the term 'bug' for a computer problem, 'debugging' became popular for 
fixing bugs after this case. 



September 15, 1947 - The Association for Computing Machinery was 
founded as the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery at a 
meeting at Columbia University in New York. It developed into the 
world's largest organization of computer professionals. 



September 15, 1947 — RCA released the 12AX7 vacuum tube for public 
sale. The miniature dual triode vacuum tube with high voltage gain 
became popular with tube amplifier enthusiasts and has been in 
continuous production since. 



October 9, 1947 - Eckert-Mauchly Computer Co. signed a contract with 
Northrop to develop the BINary Automatic Computer. BINAC was the 
only computer ever built by the company founded by ENIAC pioneers J. 
Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. 



67 



November 17, 1947 - Walter Brattain dumped a semiconductor 
experiment into a thermos of water and unexpectedly saw a large 
amplification of electricity. Working with John Bardeen they developed it 
into a new amplifier that would eventually be called the transistor. 



December 16, 1947 -John Bardeen and Walter Brattain applied two 
closely-spaced gold contacts held in place by a plastic wedge to the surface 
of a small slab of high-purity germanium. It was later called the 
Transistor. 



December 23, 1947 -John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrate their 
new discovery transistor at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. 
William Shockley, who contributed to the invention, missed the 
presentation. 



1948 



January 5, 1948 - Warner Brothers showed the very first colour newsreel, 
featuring the Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl football 
game. 



January 27, 1948 - IBM dedicated its "SSEC" in New York City. The 
Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and 
instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 
21,000 relays. 



March 9, 1948 - The University of California at Berkeley and the Atomic 
Energy Commission announced the artificial production of mesons using 
the 184-inch cyclotron at the university's Radiation Laboratory. 



March 17, 1948 - William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. 
His stories are credited with launching cyberpunk literature, named after 
the phrase he used in the story "Burning Chrome". 



68 



June 3, 1948 - Ed Brown Jr., a former Navy pilot, opened a fly-in movie 
theater near Wall Township, New Jersey. You could also drive in. The 
theater had space for 500 cars and 25 small planes could land in a nearby 
airfield and taxi over to the theater. 



June 21, 1948 - The Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM took 52 
minutes to run its first program, written by Professor Tom Kilburn. 
SSEM was the first computer to store programs electronically. 



June 30, 1948 - Bell Labs introduced the point-contact transistor 
demonstrated by its inventors, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at a 
press conference in Murray Hill, NJ. 



June 30, 1948 - The FCC authorisation of recording devices in connection 
with interstate or foreign telephone service went into effect. Users of the 
service had to be given adequate notice including a tone warning signal at 
regular intervals. 



1949 



January 10, 1949 - In response to Columbia's new 33-RPM long playing 
record, RCA kicked off a platter war introducing the the 7-inch diameter 
45 rpm "single" in the US 



January 17, 1949 - The first synchrotron installed at the Radiation 
Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, reached its design 
energy of 300 MeV. 



January 26, 1949 - The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory saw first 
light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture 
optical telescope. Hubble photographed Hubble's Variable Nebula (NGC 
2261). 



February 24, 1949 - A modified German V-2 ballistic missile launched 
from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reached an altitude of 
244 miles, putting it well above the Karman line. It was the first US rocket 
to reach "outer space." 

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May 6, 1949 - The EDSAC, the first practical stored program computer, 
performed its first calculation. It operated at a speed of 714 operations 
per second. 



May 25, 1949 -Josef Carl Engressia,Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. 
He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whisde 
at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment. 



June 8, 1949 - George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four was 
published. The book still affects notions of privacy and inspired the iconic 
Apple commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer. 



June 15, 1949 - Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in 
his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until 
advances in semiconductors in the 1970s. 



July 12, 1949 - At an IBM sales meeting, Thomas J. Watson Jr. predicted 
that within 10 years, electronics would replace moving parts in machines. 
His vision launched IBM into dominating the computer industry. 



July 27, 1949 — The first jet-powered airliner, the de Havilland Comet, 
made its first flight. Previously jet engines had only been used to power 
small fighter aircraft. 



October 21, 1949 - An Wang filed a patent for a magnetic ferrite core 
memory, that he called pulse transfer controlling devices. Two years later 
he formed Wang computers. 



December 29, 1949 - TV station KC2XAK of Bridgeport, Connecticut 
became the first Ultra high frequency (UHF) television station to operate 
a daily schedule. 



70 



THE FIFTIES 



1950 



January 24, 1950 - Percy LeBaron Spencer received a patent for a 
"Method of Treating Foodstuffs" which we would recognise as the 
Microwave Oven. 



In 1950 - Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of a new 
kind of electric eye called the phototransistor. Dr. John Northrup Shive 
invented the transistor, which operated by light rather than electricity. 



July 24, 1950 - The Bumper 8, made of a German V-2 missile lower stage 
and WAC-Corporal upper stage launched from the Cape Canaveral Air 
Force Station. It was the first launch from what would become the 
Kennedy Space Center. 



August 11, 1950 - Steve Wozniak was born in San Jose, California. He 
would grow up to invent the first successful personal computer, and 
revolutionize desktop computing. 



October 11, 1950 - CBS's mechanical color system is the first to be 
licensed for broadcast by the FCC. Color TV would not become 
widespread until the late 1960s. 



1951 



February 1, 1951 -TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic 
bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear 
device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada. 



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1951 - The Census UNIVAC System was accepted and subsequendy 
devoted almost exclusively to tabulating results of the 1950 Census of 
Population and Housing. It was the first UNIVAC and was capable of 
completing 1,905 operations per second, which it stored on magnetic 
tape. 



April 5, 1951 - Dean Kamen was born in Rockville Centre, New York. He 
grew up to found DEKA Research in 1982 which developed a portable 
dialysis machine, a vascular stent, and the iBOT -- a motorized wheelchair 
that climbs stairs. Oh and the Segway. 



May 11, 1951 -Jay Forrester filed a patent application for matrix core 
memory. Professor Forrester led a team at MIT that developed a three- 
dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. It was the 
first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high- 
speed. 



June 14, 1951 - The US Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into 
service calling it the world's first commercial computer. 



July 4, 1951 - Bell Labs held a press conference announcing the invention 
of the junction transistor. Dr. William Shockley was featured at the 
conference. 



July 16, 1951 - VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia. 



July 29, 1951 - A recording was made of Beethoven's 9th by EMI that 
eventually became used to justify the diameter of the CD. 



December 20, 1951 - In Idaho, the Experimental Breed Reactor no. 1 aka 
EBR-1 became the first power plant to produce electricity using atomic 
energy. It would take 2 more years to prove it could create more fuel than 
it consumed. 



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1952 



May 7, 1952 - British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduced the 
concept of the integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality 
Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. 



May 21, 1952 - IBM announced the Model 701, the first computer 
designed for scientific calculation. The 701 used electrostatic storage tube 
memory and kept information on magnetic tape. It sold much better than 
expected with 19 governments and large companies snapping them up. 



November 4, 1952 - The UNIVAC computer projected General Dwight 
David Eisenhower would defeat Adlai Stevenson for President of the US. 
All the polls showed Stevenson had a clear advantage so CBS delayed 
using the projection fearing inaccuracy. Oh how times have changed. 



December 29, 1952 - The first hearing aid using a junction transistor went 
on sale, the model 1010 manufactured by the Sonotone Corporation in 
Elmsford, NY, US 



1953 



March 17, 1953 - Australian researcher David Warren came up with the 
idea for a device to record cockpit noise and instruments during flight. 
His ARL Flight Memory Unit would eventually be known as the Black 
Box. 



April 8, 1953 - The major studios were inspired by the 1952 3D hit Bwana 
Devil. Columbia beat Warner Brothers' House of Wax to the theatre to 
make Man in the Dark the first 3D motion picture produced and released 
by a major studio. 



April 25, 1953 — Watson and Crick's presented their findings on the 
double helical structure of DNA in the publication Nature. They noted 
that the structure "suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic 
material." 50 Years later the Human Genome Project would publish a 
follow-up in Nature after sequencing the genome. 

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April 29, 1953 - KECA-TV an ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, California 
broadcast the first US experimental 3D-TV. An episode of Space Patrol 
required specially polarized glasses to watch. 



December 15, 1953 - Dudley Buck entered the idea for the Cryotron into 
his MIT notebook. The cryotron is a four-terminal superconductive 
computer component. 



1954 



January 7, 1954 - In New York at IBM headquarters, IBM and 
Georgetown University showed off their joint project on machine 
translation. More than 60 sentences were translated from Russian to 
English using 8 grammar rules. 

January 11,1 954 - BBC TV broadcast their first 'in-vision' weather 
forecast on TV. George Cowling of the Meteorological Office presented 
from the BBC's Lime Grove studios with two hand-drawn weather charts 
pinned to an easel. 



February 28, 1954 — The Westinghouse H840CK15 went on sale in the 
New York area. It is generally agreed to be the first production receiver 
using NTSC color offered to the public. Only 30 sets were sold at $1295 a 

POP- 



April 4, 1954 - Daniel Kottke was born in Bronxville, New York. Who 
would go on to befriend Steve Jobs at Reed College, assemble the first 
Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak and work on the original 
Macintosh team. 



May 17, 1954 - The first shovel load of earth was dug on the Meyrin site 
of the first CERN Laboratory building in Geneva. 



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June 7, 1954 - Computer science hero Alan Turing killed himself by eating 
an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test 
and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II. 



June 26, 1954 - At 5:30 PM the world's first nuclear power station was 
connected to the power grid Obninsk, USSR., a small town 60 miles south 
of Moscow. 



July 5, 1954 - The BBC broadcast its first daily television news bulletin. 
Richard Baker read the 20-minute bulletin billed as an "Illustrated 
summary of the news." 



September 6, 1954 - US President Eisenhower waved a ceremonial 
"neutron wand" over a neutron counter in Denver, Colorado, to signal a 
bulldozer in Shippingport, Pennsylvania to begin construction on the first 
commercial nuclear power plant. It was part of the "Atoms for Peace" 
program. 



September 20, 1954 - John Backus and his team at IBM ran the first 
FORTRAN program. FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslation and 
was the first high-level language and compiler developed. 



September 29, 1954 - CERN officially came into being. In addition to 
countless advancements in science, it would go on to foster the invention 
of the World Wide Web. 



September 30, 1954 - The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, was 
commissioned at Groton, CT. 



October 3, 1954 -John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley 
received US patents for circuits what would eventually be called the 
transistor. 



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October 7, 1954 - IBM sounded the death knell of vacuum tubes, building 
the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors. It was an 
experimental version of the IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, that 
was desktop-sized and slow just like it's vacuum-tube powered brother, 
but it used 5% of the power! 



October 18, 1954 - Texas Instruments announced the Regency TR-1, the 
first transistor radio, produced jointly with the Regency Division of 
Industrial Development Engineering Associates in Indianapolis. TI 
executive Vice President Pat Haggerty hoped the product would show 
what transistors could do and spur demand. 



1955 



February 24, 1955 - A boy was born to University of Wisconsin graduate 
students Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali. He was given up for 
adoption and taken in by a machinist and his wife in Mountain View, 
California. They named him Steve Jobs. 



March 8, 1955 - Doug Ross demonstrated the Director tape for MIT's 
Whirlwind machine, the first digital computer with real-time text and 
graphics. The idea of the Director Tape was to allow multiple problems to 
be read by the computer in one session without humans having to 
intervene and change tapes. In other words, it was an operating system. 



June 8, 1955 - Tim Berners-Lee was born in London. He grew up to 
develop the World Wide Web . 



August 7, 1955 - Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering released Japan's 
first commercially produced transistor radio, the TR-55, sold under the 
company's new name, Sony. 



August 22, 1955 - The first computer user group, SHARE, was founded 
by users of IBM's Model 704 computer. The first meeting was held in the 
basement conference room of the RAND Corporation. 



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October 2, 1 955 - ENIAC was shut down for the last time. After 1 1 years 
running at 5,000 operations a second and taking up 1,000 square feet of 
floor space, it deserved its retirement. 



October 25, 1955 Tappan introduced the first microwave oven for home 
use. It sold for $1,295. Raytheon developed the Radarrange after engineer 
Percy LeBaron Spencer was working on an active radar set and 
accidentally melted a candy bar in his pocket. 

October 28, 1955 - A pair of proud Seatde parents welcomed their new 
son, William Henry Gates the third, into the world, having no idea he 
would become one of the most loved and hated man of all time. You 
know him as Bill. 



December 24, 1955 - After an advertising misprint Continental Air 
Defense Command, CONAD started getting calls from children for Santa 
Claus, so Director of Operations Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff 
check the radar for signs of St. Nick. NORAD was created in 1958 and 
they've kept up the tracking tradition ever since. 



1956 



April 14, 1956 — Ampex demonstrated the VRX-1000 videotape recorder 
at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters 
Convention in Chicago. It was the first successful commercial videotape 
recorder. 



July 4, 1 956 - The five-year-old MIT computer Whirlwind added the 
ability to input data directly with a keyboard. Programmers began to enjoy 
independence from punch cards. 

September 4, 1956 - IBM introduced the IBM 350 Disk storage unit for 
the RAMAC 305, the first commercial computer to use magnetic disk 
storage. 



77 



September 25, 1956 — The first submarine transatlantic telephone cable 
system, TAT-1 was inaugurated, replacing slow telegraph and unreliable 
radio systems. 



October 15, 1956 - Fortran, the first modern computer language was 
shared with the public for the first time. The IBM Mathematical Formula 
Translating System made John Backus a legend, kicked off modern 
programming, and is still developed to this day by the Fortran Standards 
Technical Committee. 



1957 



January 3, 1957 - Hamilton Electric held a press conference to announce 
the World's First Electronic Watch, the Hamilton Electric 500, a watch 
that never needed winding. Just batteries. 



January 21, 1957 - NBC taped and broadcast President Dwight D. 
Eisenhower's second inauguration address, further popularizing the taping 
of video. 



February 6, 1957 - MIT introduced the cryotron, the first practical 
demonstration of superconductivity, invented by Dudley Allen Buck. The 
Cryotron paved the way for the integrated circuit which used 
semiconductivity. 



April 11, 1957 - The Ryan X-13 Vertijet took off from Edwards Air Force 
base flew for a few minutes and landed. The significant part of the short 
flight was that it took off and landed vertically, becoming the first jet 
capable of doing so. 



April 19, 1957 - The first non-test FORTRAN program ran at 
Westinghouse. It produced a missing comma diagnostic. A successful 
attempt followed shortly after. 



October 4, 1957 -The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, becoming the 
first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and motivating the US to get into 
gear and heat up the space race. 

78 



October 11, 1957 - The Jodrell Bank observatory, with the world's largest 
radio telescope, designed by Sir Bernard Lovell, began operation. It's first 
job was to track the just-launched Sputnik satellite. 



November 3, 1957 - The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 carrying the 
first animal ever to enter orbit, a dog named Laika. It would go on to 
inspire the saddest Jonathan Coulton song ever, space doggity and the 
band Laika and the Cosmonauts. 



November 25, 1957 - PG&E and General Electric inaugurate the 
Vallecitos Nuclear Power Plant in Pleasanton California. It is the first 
privately funded atomic power plant. 



December 6, 1957 - Responding to Sputnik, the United States launched 
the Vanguard TV3. The rocket only made it a little over a meter off the 
launchpad before it fell back and was destroyed. A fuel leak was thought 
to have caused the failure. 



1958 



January 4, 1958 - Sputnik I the first manmade object to orbit the earth, fell 
back into the atmosphere and disintegrated, after 92 days in space. 



January 31, 1958 - The United States entered the space age with the 
successful launch of the Explorer I satellite. Data from the satellite 
confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt circling the Earth. 



February 10, 1958 - Scientists at Lincoln Laboratory at MIT bounced 
radar signals off the planet Venus, calling it the first measurement of 
interplanetary distances. 



March 17, 1958 — The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite, 
achieving the highest altitude of any man-made vehicle to that time. 



79 



May 13, 1958 — The trademark Velcro was registered, protecting the name 
of the multi-purpose material that manages cables everywhere. 

May 20, 1958 - Robert Baumann obtained a patent for a satellite. (US No. 
2,835,548). The patent stipulated the government could use the 
technology without having to pay royalties. 



July 29, 1958 - President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and 
Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 



August 3, 1958 - The nuclear submarine USS Nautilus became the first 
watercraft to reach the geographic North Pole. Commanding Officer, 
Commander William R. Anderson, announced to his crew, "For the 
world, our country, and the Navy - the North Pole." 



October 1, 1958 - The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics was 
officially absorbed by the brand new National Aeronautics and Space 
Agency. Another expanded government bureaucracy that was only good 
for putting people on the moon. 



October 11, 1958 - NASA launched the lunar probe Pioneer 1 the first of 
the Pioneer program. It didn't get very far, falling back to Earth and 
burning up in the atmosphere. 



December 19, 1958 - The first known radio broadcast from outer space 
was transmitted. US President Eisenhower spoke from a pre-recorded 
aboard the Project SCORE experimental satellite. Redundancy paid off as 
the first recorder failed but the backup worked. 



1959 



January 2, 1959 - Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the Moon, was 
launched by the USSR. 



80 



February 6, 1959 —Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for 
miniaturized electronic circuits, the first patent for what we now call 
integrated circuits. 



February 28, 1959 — Discoverer 1 was launched on a Thor-Agena A 
rocket and became the first man-made object ever put into a polar orbit. 



March 15, 1959 - The first atomic reactor built in the US for medical 
research, achieved criticality at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 
Upton, N.Y. 



April 8, 1959 — The Department of Defense called a meeting at the 
University of Pennsylvania to define the objectives for a new Common 
Business Language. Captain Grace Hopper led the group that kicked off 
COBOL. 



April 9, 1959 — NASA publicly announced the selection of the United 
States' first seven astronauts, who quickly became known as the "Mercury 
Seven". 



April 16, 1959 - The programming language LISP had its first public 
presentation. Created by John McCarthy, LISP offered programmers 
flexibility in organization. 



May 1, 1959 - Shordy after construction had begun, NASA's Goddard 
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland was officially named in honor 
of the pioneering rocket scientist. 



May 27, 1959 - After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind 
computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an 
electrostatic tube memory. 



May 28, 1959 - A committee of government, military and business 
computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the 
COBOL computer language. 



81 



May 30, 1959 - The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher CockerelTs 
SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. 



July 25, 1959 - Christopher CockerelTs Hovercraft crossed the English 
Channel for the first time, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Frenchman 
Louis Bleriot's historic first cross-Channel heavier-than-air flight. 



September 14, 1959 - After 33.5 hours of flight, Luna 2 became the first 
human-made object to strike the moon. 



September 16, 1959 — The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, 
was introduced at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York City. ONe 
caught fire. The demo that was carried live on television did not catch fire. 



October 7, 1959 - The Soviet Space Probe Luna 3 took the first 
photographs of the dark side of the moon. You're welcome Pink Floyd. 



October 16, 1959 - Control Data Corp. released its model 1604 computer, 
the first from William Norris's group that left Sperry Rand Corp. 



December 25, 1959 - Sony announced its first television set, the 
transistor-based TV-301. It would go on sale in Japan the following May. 



December 29, 1959 - Physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk called 
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", in which he suggested it should 
be possible to make nanoscale machines that can arrange atoms the way 
we want. So happy birthday nanotechnology. 



82 



THE SIXTIES 



1960 



January 23, 1960 - With a crew of two, the bathyscaphe Trieste, 
descended 10,911 meters in the Pacific Ocean into Challenger Deep in the 
Mariana Trench near Guam, the deepest known point in the oceans. 



January 28, 1960 - The Communications Moon Relay System was 
inaugurated publicly when a facsimile picture of the USS Hancock was 
transmitted wirelessly by radio wave to Washington DC, by being 
bounced off the moon. 



March 22, 1960 - Arthur Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes were 
granted the first patent for a laser (US No. 2,929,922) under the tide 
"Masers and Maser Communications System." 



April 13, 1960 - The United States launched Navy Transit 1-B. It 
demonstrated the first engine restart in space and more famously the 
feasibility of using satellites as navigational aids, proving systems like GPS 
would work. 



May 10, 1960 - The nuclear-powered USS Triton submarine, arrived in 
Groton, Connecticut, after completing the first completely submerged 
circumnavigation of Earth. 



May 16, 1960 - While working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the 
Hughes Aircraft Company in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore 
Maiman used a synthetic-ruby crystal to create the first laser. 



July 20, 1960 - In a first for missiles, a Polaris Al test vehicle was 
successfully launched from the USS George Washington submarine off 
the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida. 



83 



August 12, 1960 - The first NASA communications satellite, Echo 1 was 
launched from Cape Canaveral. The satellite was a balloon of Mylar 
polyester film. 



August 15, 1960 - A long-distance phone link was tested using the Echo 1 
satellite. William Victor placed a call from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 
at Goldstone, California to William C.Jakes Jr. at the Bell Laboratories in 
Holmdel, New Jersey, bouncing off the satellite to make the connection. 



September 26, 1960 - For the first time, a US presidential debate was 
televised. Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy debated in Chicago 
and were perceived differently by those who listened on radio versus 
those who watched on television. 



November 7, 1960 - The JOSS (Johniac Open Shop System) 
conversational time-sharing service began on the Rand Corporation's 
Johnniac computer. Time sharing reduced the time programmers had to 
wait after turning in their punch cards. 



1961 



January 31, 1961 - The US launched a 4-year-old male chimpanzee named 
Ham on a Mercury- Redstone 2 rocket into suborbital flight to test the 
capabilities of the Mercury capsule. 



March 9, 1961 — Sputnik 9 successfully launched, carrying a human 
dummy and and the dog Chernushka. It completed 1 orbit and was 
successfully recovered upon return. Yes, the dog made it back unharmed. 



April 12, 1961 - Yuri Gagarin of the USSR made a 108-minute orbital 
flight in the Vostok 1 spacecraft, becoming the first human in space. 



April 25, 1961 - Robert Noyce received the US patent for the silicon- 
based integrated circuit. He went on to found the Intel Corporation with 
Gordon E. Moore in 1968. Noyce fought a long patent rights batde with 
Jack Kilby who invented a germanium-based integrated circuit. 



84 



May 5, 1961 - First NASA astronaut Alan Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 
Mercury capsule on its 15-minute 28-second suborbital flight. 



May 19, 1961 — Venera 1 became the first manmade object to fly-by 
another planet by passing within 100,000 KM of Venus. The probe did 
not send back any data having lost contact with Earth a month earlier. 



May 24, 1961 - Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument 
Computer (LINC), at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest 
examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with 
while it operated. It's credited with setting the standard for personal 
computer design. 



May 25, 1961 - US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to 
Congress declaring; the United States would eo to the Moon. 



July 19, 1961 - Trans World Airlines began offering regular in-flight 
movies on scheduled flights. The first film shown, only in the first class 
cabin, mind you, was "By Love Possessed," starring Lana Turner and 
Efrem Zimbalist Jr. 



1962 



January 10, 1962 - NASA announced plans to build the C-5, a three stage 
rocket launch vehicle. It became better known as the Saturn V Moon 
rocket, which launched every Apollo Moon mission. 

February 20, 1962 - Following the USSR, the United States put its first 
man into orbit. John Glenn piloted the Mercury- Adas 6 Friendship 7 
spacecraft to a successful conclusion of the mission. 



April 21, 1962 - President John F. Kennedy opened the Seatde World's 
fair by telephone from Palm Beach, Florida. He pressed a gold telegraph 
key, which focused an antenna at Andover, Maine and a Navy radio 



85 



telescope station in Maryland on a star to pick up a 10,000 year-old radio 
signal. That in turn set in motion various exhibits at the fair. 



July 10, 1962 - The world's first communication satellite, Telstar, was 
launched into orbit from cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket. 



July 22, 1962 - The first Mariner space probe to Venus had to be 
destroyed shortly after lift-off because of "improper operation of the 
Adas airborne beacon equipment." The error was caused by a missing 
overbar in the program that must have disappeared during hand 
transcription. 



August 27, 1962 — NASA launched the Mariner 2 unmanned space 
mission to Venus. 



September 12, 1962 - US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at 
the stadium of Rice University, declaring, "We choose to go to the 
moon." Many consider the speech the beginning of the space race. 



December 13, 1962 - NASA "Relay 1" launched, the first active repeater 
communications satellite in orbit. 



1963 



June 16, 1963 - Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first 
woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times. 

June 20, 1963 — A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and 
the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would 
become the famous "red telephone" it started as a teletype. 



June 24, 1963 - The first demonstration of a home video recorder was 
made at the BBC News Studios in London. A Telcan, short for television 
in a can, could record up to 20 minutes of black and white television using 
quarter-inch tape on a reel-to-reel system. 



86 



August 6, 1963 - Kevin Mitnick was born in Van Nuys, California. He 
would grow up to become the world's most wanted hacker, and then one 
of the world's most sought after security experts. 



August 30, 1963 — A direct line of communication between the leaders of 
the USA and USSR, dubbed "The Hodine" began operation. 



November 1, 1963 - The largest radio telescope ever constructed, the 
Arecibo observatory opened in Arecibo Puerto Rico. It would be used for 
many major discoveries including the first direct imaging of an asteroid. 



November 22, 1963 - One of the most famous 8mm home movies ever 
recorded was filmed on a Model 414 PD Bell and Howell in Dealey Plaza 
in downtown Dallas, Texas. The Zapruder film showed President John F. 
Kennedy and Governor John Connally being shot. 



November 23, 1963 - At 6:15 PM the BBC premiered its new family 
science fiction show, Doctor Who, with its first episode, "An Unearthly 
Child." 



December 7, 1963 - The CBS broadcast of the college football game 
between Army and Navy featured the first use of video instant replay 
during a sports telecast. Some people got confused and called to 
complain. 



1964 



January 12, 1964 -Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He 
would grow up to study computer science at Princeton, and set the 
standard for online shopping with his company, Amazon.com. 



April 7, 1964 - IBM unveiled the System/360 line of mainframe 
computers, its most successful computer system. Called the "360" because 
it was meant to address all possible sizes and types of customer with one 
unified software-compatible architecture. 



87 



April 20, 1964 - The first AT&T picturephone transcontinental call was 
made between test displays at Disneyland and the New York World's Fair. 



April 21, 1964 — Satellite Transit- 5BN-3 failed to reach orbit after launch. 
It dispersed 2.1 pounds (0.95 kg) of radioactive plutonium in its SNAP 
RTG power source. 



May 1, 1964 - Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College, 
launched a time-sharing system using a language meant to be learned 
quickly, called BASIC. 



October 10, 1964 - The opening ceremonies of the summer Olympics in 
Tokyo became the first Olympic broadcast relayed live by geostationary 
communication satellite. Too bad all the US networks gave up on live 
broadcasts of the Olympics. 

November 28, 1964 - NASA launched Mariner 4 toward Mars where it 
would conduct the first successful flyby of the red planet. 



1965 



February 17, 1965 — The Ranger 8 probe launched on its mission to 
photograph the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon. The photos paved the 
way to select the area as the site of the first manned Moon landing. 



March 18, 1965 — The Voskhod 2 launched and on the second orbit 
Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left the capsule (on purpose) for 12 minutes, 
becoming the first person to walk in space. 



March 21, 1965 — NASA launched Ranger 9, the last in a series of 
unmanned lunar space probes. Ranger 9 slammed into the Moon sending 
back high-resolution pictures of the Lunar surface before impact. 



April 6, 1965 — Hughes Aircraft's Early Bird launched into orbit. It was 
the first communications satellite to be placed in synchronous orbit and 
successfully demonstrated the concept of synchronous satellites for 
commercial communications. 



April 19, 1965 - "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits" 
by Gordon Moore was published in Electronics. Moore projected that over 
the next ten years the number of components per chip would double 
every 12 months. By 1975 he turned out to be right, and the doubling 
became immortalized as Moore's law. 



June 3, 1965 — Gemini 4 launched on the first multi-day space mission by 
a NASA crew. Crewmember Ed White performed the first US spacewalk. 



June 28, 1965 - Officials in the US and Europe conducted the first 
commercial telephone conversation over satellite Early Bird I. The 
satellite also began operation for television transmission "live via satellite" 
as well. 



July 14, 1965 - The Mariner 4 did a flyby of Mars, taking 21 full pictures, 
the first close-up photos of another planet returned from space. 



August 11, 1965 - Shinji Mikami was born in Japan. He grew up to 
become a video game designer for Capcom, revolutionizing survival- 
horror games with his popular series, Resident Evil. 



August 29, 1965 - Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, orbiting 100 miles above 
the Earth in Gemini 5 talked with aquanaut M. Scott Carpenter in Sealab 
II, 205 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It happened to be 
Cooper's wedding anniversary. 



November 16, 1965 — The Soviet Union launched the Venera 3 space 
probe toward Venus. It would become the first spacecraft to reach the 
surface of another planet, though it failed to return data. 



89 



December 15, 1965 - Gemini 6A, crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas 
Stafford launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Four orbits later, it 
achieved the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7. 



1966 



February 3, 1966 - The Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the 
moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first lunar soft landing and first 
transmission of photographic data from the Moon to Earth. 



March 3, 1966- The BBC announces plans to begin broadcasting 
television programmes in colour the following year, becoming the first 
European broadcaster to provide regular colour broadcasts. 



April 3, 1966 - Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to enter lunar orbit. It 
completed its first orbit in two hours 58 minutes. 



August 7, 1966 - Jimmy Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. He grew 
up to co-found Wikipedia. 



August 23, 1966 — Lunar Orbiter 1 takes the first photograph of Earth 
from orbit around the Moon. 



September 8, 1966 - The TV show Star Trek made its network television 
debut with the episode "The Man Trap". Star Trek would have a 
profound influence on future technology thought and design. 



1967 



January 27, 1967 - The first US astronauts died in the line of duty. Gus 
Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed on the launch pad 
when a flash fire engulfed their command module during testing for the 
first Apollo-Saturn mission. 



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April 17, 1967 - The Surveyor 3 spacecraft was successfully launched 
from Cape Kennedy, Florida on its mission to the Moon. It was the first 
to carry a surface soil sampling scoop. 



May 9, 1967 - The National Center for Atmospheric Research dedicated 
its new building in Boulder Colorado. Funded by a $100,000 grant from 
the Max C. Fleishmann Foundation and designed by renowned architect 
I.M. Pei., the center pioneered investigation of weather patterns and other 
atmospheric phenomena. 



June 25, 1967 - The very first Consumer Electronics Show opened in 
New York occupying the Americana and New York Hilton Hotels. It was 
devoted to home entertainment electronics and featured such advances as 
portable color TVs and video tape recorders. 



June 27, 1967 — The world's first ATM was installed at a Barclays Bank 
branch in Enfield Town, England, United Kingdom. 



August 1, 1967 - The US Navy recalled Captain Grace Murray Hopper to 
active duty to help develop the programming language COBOL. 



October 10, 1967 - The Outer Space Treaty came into force, banning 
nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction being placed 
in Earth orbit or on any other celestial body. It also prevents any state 
from claiming a sovereignty over any celestial resource like the Moon. 



November 9, 1967 - NASA launched a Saturn V rocket carrying Apollo 4, 
a test craft launched from Cape Kennedy. It was the first launch in the 
Apollo program and the first time using the Launch Control Center at 
Kennedy Space Center. 



November 19, 1967 — Hong Kong TV, the first free over the air 
commercial television station in Hong Kong was established. Today it is 
known as TVB. 



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December 11, 1967 - The Concorde, a joint British-French venture and 
the world's first supersonic airliner, was unveiled in Toulouse, France. 
Bigger news than the speed of the jet was the announcement that it was 
finally agreed that the British and French planes would both be spelled 
with an "e" at the end. 



1968 



January 22, 1968 - Apollo 5 lifted off carrying the first Lunar module into 
space. 

February 16, 1968 - The first-ever 911 call was placed by Alabama 
Speaker of the House Rankin Fite from Haleyville City Hall to US Rep. 
Tom Bevill at the city's police station. 



July 18, 1968 - Robert Noyce, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore 
incorporated Moore and Noyce electronics, swiftly renamed at Noyce's 
daughter's suggestion to Integrated Electronics Corporation, or Intel for 
short. 



October 22, 1968 - The US bounced back from tragedy with the first 
manned mission to space, Apollo 7 safely splashing down in the Atlantic 
Ocean after orbiting the Earth 163 times. 



November 1, 1968 - The MPAA and 2 other industry organisations 
introduced the voluntary ratings system. G meant good for all ages, M 
meant mature audiences, R was restricted and X... well you know what X 
means. It would serve as a model for future voluntary systems like that 
used by the video game industry. 



December 9, 1968 - Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart gave a 
legendary product demonstration of MLS that would become known as 
"the mother of all demos." Among other things it introduced the 
computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word 
processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, 
bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. 



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December 21, 1968 — Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, 
launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew performed 
the first ever manned Trans Lunar Injection and became the first humans 
to leave Earth's gravity. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first 
computer to use integrated circuit logic. 



December 22, 1968 - At 3:01 PM Eastern time, Apollo 8 transmitted the 
first US live telecast from a manned spacecraft in outer space. 



December 23, 1968 - Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, 
Jr., and William A. Anders made the lunar-orbit-insertion maneuver on 
their way to becoming the first humans to orbit the Moon. 

December 24, 1968: The crew of Apollo 8 delivered a live, televised 
Christmas Eve broadcast after becoming the first humans to orbit another 
space body. 



December 27, 1968 - Apollo 8 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, 
ending the first manned orbit of the Moon. 



1969 



January 16, 1969 - The Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 spacecraft successfully 
docked in orbit. Yevgeny Khrunov moved from Soyuz-5 to Soyuz-4 and 
Alexei Yeliseyev went from 4 to 5, marking the first time spacefarers went 
up in one craft and returned to Earth in another. 



February 9, 1969 - The Boeing 747 jumbo jet took flight for the first time. 
It was the first wide-body plane ever produced. 



March 13, 1969 — Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth after orbital testing of 
the first crewed Lunar Module. 



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April 7, 1969 — The first Request For Comment, RFC 1 put together by 
Steve Crocker was distributed on the newly operational ARPANET. 
RFCs describe methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to 
the working of the Internet. 



May 18, 1969 - Apollo 10 launched, completing all the stages of a moon- 
landing mission without landing on the Moon. Astronauts Eugene Cernan 
and Thomas Stafford descended in the Lunar Module to within 15KM of 
the lunar surface. 



May 26, 1969 - Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day 
test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing. 



July 16, 1969 - Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael 
Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on Apollo 11, the first manned 
mission to the surface of the moon. 



July 20, 1969 - In a first for humans, Neil Armstrong and Edwin A. 
"Buzz" Aldrin Jr. Successfully landed the Lunar Module "Eagle" on the 
surface of the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission and became the first 
humans to ever set foot on earth's satellite. 



July 24, 1969 - Apollo 1 1 arrived safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the 
first manned mission to land on the Moon. 



August 30, 1969 - BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor 
(IMP) to the Network Measurements Center at UCLA. It was built from a 
Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, and would be used 
in October to make the first Internet connection with Stanford. Graduate 
students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike 
Wingfield were charged with installation. 



October 5, 1969 - The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus aired 
on the BBC. The show created the Spam sketch that would eventually 
inspire the slang term for unsolicited email. 



94 



October 29, 1969 - The first ever computer-to-computer link was 
established on the ARPANET. UCLA student Charley Kline sent the 
characters 1 and o to Stanford the connection crashed before he could 
finish sending 'login' The Internet has been crashy right from the start. 



November 21, 1969 - The first permanent ARPANET link was 
established between the Interface Message Processor or IMP at UCLA 
and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. 



November 24, 1969 - The Apollo 12 command module with its all-Navy 
crew splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second 
manned mission to the Moon. Credit goes to the USS Hornet for its 
second flawless recovery effort. 



THE SEVENTIES 



1970 



February 11, 1970 - With the launch of Osumi 5, Japan became the fourth 
country (after the US, USSR and France) to place a satellite into orbit. 



April 11, 1970 — Apollo 13 launched from Kennedy Space Center. The 
second-stage inboard engine shut down early but orbital insertion was 
achieved. However the problems were not over. 



April 13, 1970 — The crew of Apollo 13 heard a sharp bang and vibration 
followed by a warning light. Jack Swigert radioed back the famous words 
"Houston, we've had a problem here." 



April 17, 1970 — The Apollo 13 spacecraft returned safely to Earth after a 
frightening malfunction caused the team to abort landing on the Moon 
and scramble to keep themselves alive. 



April 24, 1970 — The Chang Zheng- 1 rocket launched the first Chinese 
satellite, the Dong Fang Hong-1. 



95 



April 26, 1970 — The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual 
Property Organization entered into force. 



August 20, 1970 - John Carmack was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. 
He would grow up to co-found id software and bring the world Doom, 
Wolfenstein and Quake. 



November 12, 1970 - The Oregon Highway Divisions made an ill-advised 
attempt to destroy a dead whale by blowing it up with explosives. The 
results, documented by local news, eventually became Internet gold as the 
"exploding whale" video. 



November 17, 1970 — The Soviet Union landed Lunokhod 1 on Mare 
Imbrium on the Moon. It was the first roving remote-controlled robot to 
land on another world. 



1971 



January 31, 1971 - Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar 
Mitchell lifted off on the Apollo 14 mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands 
on the Moon. 



February 6, 1971 - Apollo 14's Lunar Module lifted off from the moon, 
returning astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to the Command 
Module. Shepard had made extra history by becoming the first human to 
hit a golf ball on the moon. 



February 8, 1971 - 10 years after the SEC suggested automation could 
solve the problem of fragmentation in over-the-counter stocks, the 
National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations or 
NASDAQ index began trading, the world's first electronic stock market. 



April 16, 1971 - Abhay Bhushan proposed FTP (File Transfer Protocol) 
in RFC 114. 



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May 28, 1971 - The USSR launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in 
December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land 
successfully on Mars. 



July 9, 1971 - Marc Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He would 
grow up to develop the Netscape browser, which powered the explosion 
of the Web in the late 1 990s. 



July 30, 1971 - The Apollo 15 mission landed the first lunar rover onto 
the moon. 



July 31, 1971 - Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin became 
the first humans to take a drive on the Moon in the lunar rover. 



November 14, 1971 - The American space probe Mariner 9 began 
orbiting Mars becoming the first spacecraft to successfully orbit another 
planet. 



November 15, 1971 - Intel released the world's first commercial single- 
chip microprocessor, the 4004 with an advertisement in Electronic News, 
though the chip may have been delivered earlier in the spring to some 
customers. It was the first complete CPU on one chip. 



November 27, 1971 — The Soviet Union's Mars 2 orbiter released its 
descent module, which probably had too steep an angle of entry, and 
malfunctioned and crashed. But hey, it was still the first manmade object 
to reach the surface of Mars. 



1972 



January 5, 1972 - President Richard M. Nixon announced that NASA 
would develop a space shuttle system, emphasizing its reliability, 
reusability and low cost. 



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February 1, 1972 - The first scientific handheld calculator, the famous 
HP-35, was introduced for $395 by Hewlett-Packard. It was the first 
handheld calculator to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions 
with one keystroke. 



June 27, 1972 - Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabny filed incorporation papers 
for Atari, Inc. and got ready to release its first product, a game called 
Pong. 



October 3, 1972 - The first USA/Japan Computer Conference was held in 
Tokyo. 



November 29, 1972 - Nolan Bushnell installed a coin-operated arcade 
game at Andy Capp's tavern in Sunnyvale, California. It only played Allan 
Alcorn's Pong. Within 4 months there were 10,000 across the country. 



December 7, 1972 - The last Apollo moon mission, Apollo 17 was 
launched. The crew took the famous Blue Marble picture that now graces 
desktop background everywhere. 



December 11, 1972 - Apollo 17 became the sixth and last Apollo mission 
to land on the Moon. 



December 14, 1972 - Eugene Cernan ended a 7 hour and 15 minute 
EVA, climbed back aboard the Apollo 17 Lunar Module and became the 
last person to walk on the moon. 



December 19, 1972 — Apollo 17, the last manned lunar flight crewed by 
Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt, returned to Earth. 



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1973 



January 8, 1973 - Less than a month after Apollo 17, the last manned 
Moon mission, the USSR launched space mission Luna 21 carrying lunar 
rover Lunakhod 2. 



January 14, 1973 - Elvis Presley's concert, "Aloha from Hawaii" was 
broadcast live via satellite, and set a record as the most watched broadcast 
by an individual entertainer in television history. 



February 12, 1973 - Along Interstate 71 in Ohio, the first metric distance 
road signs to be erected in the US were put in place. They informed of 
the distance between Columbus and Cleveland and Columbus and 
Cincinnati. 



March 26, 1973 - Larry Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. He 
would go on to help invent and co-found Google. 



April 2, 1973 - Lexis launched Computerized Legal Searching. It was 
limited to searching the full text of cases in Ohio and New York. 



April 3, 1973 — Martin Cooper, general manager of Motorola's 
Communications Systems Division made the first handheld portable 
phone call from a New York City street to Joel S. Engel at rival Bell Labs. 
Presumably he gloated at least a litde. 



April 6, 1973 — NASA launched the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, the second 
mission to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system and the first to 
explore the planet Saturn and its main rings. 



May 14, 1973 — The United States launched Skylab, the country's first 
space station as part of the Apollo space program. 



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May 22, 1973 - Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 
wrote a memo on an IBM Selectric typewriter, outlining how to connect 
personal computers to a shared printer. Metcalfe says "If Ethernet was 
invented in any one memo, by any one person, or on any one day, this 
was it." 



July 13, 1973 - Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the Nixon 
tapes to the US Senate committee investigating the Watergate break-in. 
Always make back-ups, unless you want to remain President. 



August 21, 1973 - Sergey Brin was born in Moscow. His family 
immigrated to the US in 1979. He would grow up to co-develop a search 
engine with Larry Page and co-found Google. 



October 19, 1973 - The Atanasoff-Berry Computer finally got its due. US 
Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent 
was invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital 
computer. But ENIAC still incorrecdy gets the credit from many to this 
day. 



November 3, 1973 - NASA launched Mariner 10 towards Mercury. It 
would become the first space probe to reach the planet. 



December 12, 1973 - Founder of LinkExchange, CEO of Zappos, and 
promoter of customer-centric business, Tony Hsieh was born. 



1974 



February 5, 1974 - The US space probe Mariner 10 returned the first 
close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity 
assist from one planet to help it reach another. 



March 29, 1974 — NASA's Mariner 10 became the first space probe to 
cross the orbit of Mercury about 704 km from the surface. 



100 



April 13, 1974 — Western Union, NASA and Hughes Aircraft, teamed up 
to launch the United States' first commercial geosynchronous 
communications satellite, Westar 1, The system relayed data, voice, video, 
and fax transmissions to the continental US, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska, 
and the Virgin islands. 



June 26, 1974 - At 8:01 AM, a supermarket cashier scanned a 10-pack of 
Wrigley's chewing gum across a bar-code scanner at Marsh Supermarket 
in Troy, Ohio. It was the first product ever checked out by Universal 
Product Code. 



December 19, 1974 - The Altair 8800 microcomputer from Micro 
Instrumentation Telemetry Systems in Albuquerque, New Mexico went 
on sale. For $439 you got everything you needed to build a computer in 
one kit boasting 256 bytes of memory! 



1975 



January 30, 1975 - Hungarian Interior Design instructor Erno Rubik filed 
for a patent on his twisty toy cubes. The patent worked out for him. Erno 
Rubik became the first self-made millionaire from the Communist bloc. 



March 5, 1975 - The Homebrew Computer Club, held its first meeting in 
the garage of Gordon French in Menlo Park, California. 32 people 
showed up for the first meeting. John Draper, Steve Wozniak and Steve 
Jobs were some of the more famous members of the club. 



April 4, 1975 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a partnership in 
Albuquerque New Mexico. The venture was later named Micro-soft. 



June 7, 1975 - Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder for sale. It 
would lose the format war to VHS but find a niche in broadcast 
production. 

June 29, 1 975 - Steve Wozniak built the first prototype of the Apple I, the 
first computer to show letters on the screen as you typed them. 



101 



July 21, 1975 - Xerox announced its withdrawal from computer 
mainframe manufacturing. The company did indicate it would continue 
activities in other computer-related businesses like computer disk drives, 
serial printers, and apparendy giving away secrets to companies like Apple 
and Microsoft. 



October 20, 1975 - Atari filed for a patent on the sit-down "cockpit" 
arcade cabinet, literally putting you inside the game. The game Hi-Way 
with the slogan "Hi Way — All It Needs Is Wheels", was the first Atari 
game to use the cabinet. It was a first-person driver in which you had to 
dodge cars and... well... drive. 



October 22, 1975 - The Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 landed 
on Venus. Pics or it didn't happen you say? Well Venera 9 was the first 
spacecraft to return an image from the surface of another planet. 



1976 



January 13, 1976 - Raymond Kurzweil and the leaders of the National 
Federation of the Blind announced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the 
first text-to-speech machine. Walter Cronkite used it to deliver his 
signature sign-off, "And that's the way it was, January 13, 1976." 



March 4, 1976 - The first Freon-cooled Cray-1 supercomputer was 
shipped to Los Alamos Laboratories, in New Mexico at a cost of 
$19,000,000. 



March 26, 1976 — Queen Elizabeth II sent the first royal email, from the 
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern as a part of a 
demonstration of networking technology. 



April 1, 1976 - Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne decided to 
change their garage project into a company and formed Apple Computer. 
It would be incorporated the following January. 



102 



April 16, 1976 - The Helios-B deep-space probe made (what was then) the 
closest controlled approach to the Sun at 43 million km or within 0.3 AU. 



July 11, 1976 - K&E produced its last slide rule, which it presented to the 
Smithsonian Institution. While slide rules continue to be made, especially 
for marine and aviation uses, K&E had been the dominant manufacturer, 
and this signaled the end of an era, and the rise of the electronic 
calculator. 



July 20, 1976 - In a first for robots, the Viking 1 lander successfully set 
down on on Mars in the Chryse Planitia and performed its mission. 



July 31, 1976 - NASA issued a press release describing one photo taken by 
Viking 1 on Mars as resembling "a human head." Conspiracy theories 
about the face on Mars still run today, though close-up pictures from the 
Mars Express mission have debunked most of them. 



September 3, 1976 - Viking 2 landed on Mars and began taking high- 
resolution pictures, measuring the atmosphere and surface, and look for 
evidence of life. 



November 25, 1976 - The Project Viking landers passed through superior 
conjunction at Mars, enabling scientists to begin an experiment that used 
the landers as transponders. The data collected confirmed the Shapiro 
Delay, becoming one of the best confirmations of General Relativity we 
have seen. 



1977 



January 3, 1977 - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak incorporated Apple 
Computer Company. Ron Wayne famously backed out selling his shares 
back for $800. Ouch. 



February 18, 1977 - The Enterprise space shuttle orbiter prototype made 
the first of five "captive-inactive" flight tests, testing structural integrity 
and performance handling, while attached to the top of a 747 jumbo jet. 



103 



April 15, 1977 - The first West Coast Computer Faire took place in Palo 
Alto. The star of the show would turn out to be the Apple II. The 
computer featured a built-in keyboard, 16 kilobytes of memory, BASIC, 
and eight expansion slots all for $1,300. 



June 4, 1977 - JVC introduced the open standard for the VHS 
videocassette in North America at a press conference before the 
Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. 



June 5, 1977 — The Apple II went on sale. It had a bus speed of 1 MHz 
and 64 KB of memory. 



June 10, 1977 — A few days after going on sale, Apple began shipping the 
Apple II for the first time. 



June 16, 1977 - Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in 
Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. 
They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle. 



July 13, 1977 - Lightning struck a Consolidated Edison substation on the 
Hudson River, tripping two circuit breakers and setting off a chain of 
events that resulted in a massive power failure. The entire city of New 
York was blacked out. 



August 3, 1977 - Tandy Corp of Texas held a New York press conference 
to announce that it will manufacture the TRS-80. 



August 12, 1977 - The space shuttle Enterprise carried out its first free 
flight test, when the orbiter was released from the back of a 747 in flight. 



September 5, 1977 — NASA launched Voyager 1 after a brief delay. 
Although it was launched 1 6 days after Voyager 2, it's faster flight path 
would take it past Jupiter first. 



104 



October 14, 1977 - The Atari 2600 went on sale in North America. 



October 25, 1977 - VAX/VMS was born. At a shareholder meeting, DEC 
the Digital Equipment Corporation released VMS vl.O the first version of 
what we later be called OpenVMS, along with the VAX 11/780 
architecture which increased the PDP-11 address space. 



November 18, 1977 - A startup called Microsoft, fresh off developing its 
own version of FORTRAN, wins the right in arbitration to license its 
version of BASIC, previously licensed exclusively through MITS, makers 
of the Altair. 



December 1, 1977 - Time Warner launched QUBE in Columbus, Ohio, 
the first two-way interactive cable system. One of its channels called "The 
Pinwheel" would later be relaunched as Nickelodeon. 



December 13, 1977 - Robert Metcalfe et. al were awarded a patent for 
"Multipoint data communication system with collision detection" AKA 
ethernet. 



December 13, 1977 - Young Bill Gates was arrested for traffic violation in 
Albuquerque, New Mexico, leading to one of the most famous mugshots 
ever. 



1978 



February 16, 1978 - After a particularly harsh January gave them plenty of 
time for programming, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess completed the 
Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) in Chicago. It was the first 
BBS. 



March 8, 1978 — The first radio episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the 
Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, is transmitted on BBC Radio 4. Some credit 
Adams with accidentally predicting the PDA and smartphone. 



105 



April 2, 1978 - The patent expired on Swiss inventor George de Mestral's 
invention of a hook and loop fastener he called Velcro. Soon children 
everywhere no longer had to learn to tie shoes quite so early in life. 



May 3, 1978 - Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent the first 
unsolicited mass commercial email to 600 west coast ARPANET users. 
The message informed users of DEC's new computer and operating 
system with ARPANET support, the DECSYSTEM-2020 and TOPS-20. 



June 11, 1978 - Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first 
electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. 
It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the 
human vocal tract and predict a speech sample. 



1979 



January 2, 1979 - Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston incorporated Software 
Arts for the purpose of developing VisiCalc, the world's first spreadsheet 
program. 



January 25, 1979 - Robert Williams was killed on the job in a Flat Rock, 
Michigan, casting plant, becoming the first recorded human death by 
robot. 



March 8, 1979 - Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical 
digital audio disc at a press conference called "Philips Introduces 
Compact Disc." 



March 25, 1979 — The first fully functional space shutde orbiter, 
Columbia, was delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center in 
preparation for its first launch. 



March 28, 1979- A combination of equipment malfunction and human 
error caused a partial reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear 
power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. While no injuries or deaths 
have been attributed to the accident, it changed US nuclear attitudes 
significantly. 

106 



May 11, 1979 - Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston gave the first 
demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made the Apple II popular 
with businesses. 



July 1, 1979 - Sony introduced the Sony Walkman TPS-L2. It weighed 14 
ounces, was blue and silver, and had a second earphone jack. It was 
originally marketed in the US as the Sound-About and in the UK as the 
Stowaway. 



July 9, 1979 - Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Jupiter, coming 
within 570,000 kilometers of the planet. 



July 11, 1979 - The US space station Skylab returned to Earth scattering 
debris over the Indian ocean and Western Australia. 



September 7, 1979 — The Entertainment and Sports Programming 
Network, ESPN, makes its debut. It will become one of the main drivers 
of cable TV adoption and one of the main factors in the switch to 
Internet television. 



September 24, 1979 - CompuServe began offering a consumer version of 
its dial-up online information service called MicroNET. The name would 
later be changed to CompuServe and offer public email among other 
online services. 



October 12, 1979 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first 
published unleashing in book form the world of Vogon Poetry, essential 
towel behavior, and the BabelFish. 



November 9, 1979 - The NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet 
Nuclear Strike. Thankfully raw data from satellites were reviewed along 
with early warning radar, proving it was a false alarm. A technician had 
loaded a test tape but failed to switch the system status to "test". Oops! 



107 



THE EIGHTIES 

1980 



April 2, 1980 - Microsoft Corporation announced their first hardware 
product the Z80 SoftCard for Apple. It was a microprocessor on a printed 
circuit board that plugged into the Apple II and sold for $349.00. 



May 22, 1980 — Namco released an arcade game called Puck-Man. When 
it was released in the US in October the name was altered to Pac-Man. 



June 7, 1980 - The first US solar power plant was dedicated at the Natural 
Bridge National Monument, Utah. 



September 5, 1980 - The last IBM 7030, AKA STRETCH, mainframe 
computer was decommissioned at Brigham Young University. 



September 30, 1980 — Xerox published the Version 1,0 specifications for 
Ethernet in conjunction with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation. 



November 6, 1980 - Microsoft signed a contract with IBM to create an 
operating system for the new IBM PC. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had 
convinced the heritage tech company that they were not only talented 
enough to pull it off, but that they should be paid a royalty on the 
software. 



December 12, 1980 - Apple's stock was initially offered for sale. 
Regulators in Massachusetts prohibited individual investors in the state 
from buying the stock, as it was deemed too risky. 



1981 



January 20, 1981 - The inauguration of US President Ronald Reagan is the 
world's first broadcast to feature live teletext subtides for the hearing 
impaired. 



108 



January 21, 1981 - The first DeLorean DMC-12 sports car rolled off the 
production line in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. This one made no use of 
gigawatts in any way. 



March 5, 1981 - The ZX81 is launched by Sinclair Research in Britain for 
£69.95 and would go on to sell over 1.5 million units around the world. It 
was much more successful than it's predecessor the ZX80. 



March 22, 1981 - RCA first SelectaVision VideoDisc the SFT100W went 
on sale. The machine used Capacitance Electronic Discs to fit a couple 
hours of video programming on a 12-inch vinyl disc that sold for around 

$15. 



April 3, 1981 - Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 at the West Coast 
Computer Faire in San Francisco. It cost $1,795 at retail. 



April 12, 1981 — Commander John Young and Pilot Robert Crippen 
crewed the first launch of a Space Shutde, The Columbia on the STS-1 
mission. During the mission they used an HP-41 calculator to calculate 
the exact angle at which they needed to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. 



April 24, 1981 - Apple introduced the portable Apple lie. The machine 
came with 128 kilobytes of RAM and a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive. 

April 27, 1981 - The first mouse integrated with a personal computer 
made its appearance with the Xerox Star workstation. 



May 26, 1981 - Satya Pal Asija received the first US patent for a computer 
software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years 
to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since 



June 21, 1981 - IBM retired the last of its "STRETCH" mainframes. 
These mainframes were part of the 7000 series that made up the 
company's first transistorized computers. 



109 



June 25, 1981 - After six years as a company, Microsoft incorporated in 
the state of Washington. 



July 7, 1981 - The first solar-powered aircraft, Solar Challenger, flew 163 
miles from Corneille-en-Verin Airport north of Paris across the English 
Channel to Manston Royal Air Force Base south of London, staying aloft 
5 hours and 23 minutes. 



July 27, 1981, Microsoft bought the rights for QDOS (Quick and Dirty 
Operating System) from Seatde Computer Products for $25,000. 



August 1, 1981 - MTV began broadcasting in the United States, playing 
The Buggies Video Kileld the Radio Star, and changing how we view 
music forever. 



August 12, 1981 - IBM introduced the model 5150 personal computer. It 
had a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft's MS- 
DOS operating system. 



August 25, 1981 - Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn. 8 years 
later on the same day in 1989, Voyager 2 would make its closest approach 
to Neptune. 



September 7, 1981 - The first large parallel processing computer, ILLIAC 
IV, ends its nearly decade-long life at the University of Illinois. 



November 19, 1981 - Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos banned 
video games, citing such insidious examples as Space Invaders and 
Asteroids that were a "destructive social enemy, the electrical bandit". 



1982 



January 8, 1982 - The United States vs. AT&T settlement was finalized 
with AT&T agreeing to divest itself of local exchanges in exchange for 
being allowed to start AT&T Computer Systems. Like Voltron, the 
behemoth would eventually reassemble. 



110 



March 5, 1982 - Four days after it's twin, the second of two Soviet probes 
to Venus, the Venera 14 landed on the planet. Venera 13 and 14 would 
continue to send data until 1983. 



April 23, 1982 - Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum launched. The 
Spectrum popularised home computing in the UK. 



June 28, 1982 - Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo with the famous 
"blibbet" of horizontal lines in the first O. New packaging, and a 
comprehensive set of retail dealer support materials came along with the 
blibbet. 



July 9, 1982 - Disney released the movie Tron, which used the most 
extensive computer-generated graphics and special effects to that time. 



August 17, 1982 - Royal Philips Electronics manufactured the world's first 
Compact Disc (not counting test pressings) at a Polygram factory in 
Langenhagen, just outside of Hanover, Germany. The CD was "The 
Visitors" by Abba. 



August 30, 1982 - A copyright was issued to 16-year-old V.A. Shiva 
Ayyadurai for a computer program he called "EMAIL," short for 
"electronic mail." While Ayyadurai may not be considered the inventor of 
email he definitely deserves credit for establishing the name. 



September 19, 1982 - In a posting made at 11:44 AM, Professor Scott 
Fahlman first proposed using the characters :-) to indicate jokes on a 
computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon 
University. In the same post he suggested :-(. 



October 1, 1982 - Sony started selling the first CD players to the public, 
the CDP-101 for 168,000 yen (that's about $730 US). At the time you 
could get Billy Joe's album 52nd street on CD.... and soon many more. 



Ill 



November 13, 1982 - 15-year-old Scott Safran of Cherry Hill New Jersey 
set the world record score on Asteroids. His record stood for 27 years, the 
longest-running high score in videogame history. 



December 2, 1982 - A Seatde dentist named Barney Clark, deemed too 
sick for a heart transplant, became the first human recipient of a 
permanent artificial heart, thejarvik 7. He survived for 112 days. 



December 26, 1982 - Time's January 3rd issue arrived on newsstands with 
the computer on the cover as Machine of the Year. It was the first non- 
human to gain the honor since the Man of the Year concept started in 
1927 with Charles Lindbergh. 



1983 



January 1, 1983 - A new Internet and Transmission Control Protocol (Yep 
called IP/TCP by some at the time, weird I know) went into effect on the 
ARPANet, replacing the Network Control Protocol. The result was a 
new ARPA Internet combining ARPA hosts of the time new systems. 



January 19, 1983 - Apple released the Lisa, the second commercial 
computer with a graphical user interface (after the Xerox Star). It only 
cost $9,995 too! 



January 26, 1983 - Lotus begins selling its spreadsheet application for 
Microsoft DOS, called 1-2-3. It would quickly become the most popular 
spreadsheet software but not make the transition to Windows well and fall 
behind Excel permanently. 



March 2, 1983 — CBS Records launches the first major compact disc 
music marketing campaign, with 16 titles. CDs had gone on sale to the 
public the previous October in Japan. 



May 2, 1983 - Microsoft Corp. announced their two-button Microsoft 
Mouse built for IBM computers and meant to be used with the new 
Microsoft Word Processor. Only 5,000 sold of the 10,000 made. 



112 



June 13, 1983 - Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass 
outside Pluto's orbit and leave the central solar system. 



June 23, 1983 - Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel ran the first successful 
test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System at the University 
of Southern California School of Engineering's Information Sciences. 



July 15, 1983 - Nintendo released the Family Computer or Famicom, 
along with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye cartridges. It 
would later be released in the US under as the Nintendo Entertainment 
System, or NES. 



July 19, 1983 - On July 19, 1983, Michael W. Vannier and his co-workers 
J. Marsh and J. Warren published the first three-dimensional 
reconstruction of single computed tomography (CT) slices of the human 
head. 



September 13, 1983 - Osborne Computer declared bankruptcy in 
Oakland, CA, federal bankruptcy court, listing assets of $40 million, 
liabilities of $45 million, and 600 creditors. Two years earlier, Osborne 
produced the first portable computer, the 24-pound Osborne I. 



September 20, 1983 - A patent for the RSA Algorithm for public-key 
cryptography was awarded. RSA stands for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and 
Leonard Adleman, who first publicly described it in 1977. 



September 26, 1983 - 17-year-old Neal Patrick, of the hacking group 414s 
testified before the US House of Representatives about computer break- 
ins and how they might be stopped. 



September 27, 1983 — Richard Stallman announced the GNU project, 
which aimed at the time to develop a free Unix-like operating system. 



October 13, 1983 - Bob Barnett, president of Ameritech Mobile 
communications, called Alexander Graham Bell's nephew from Chicago's 



113 



Soldier Field using a Motorola DynaTAC handset. It marked the launch 
of the first cellular telephone network in the US. 



October 21, 1983 - The seventeenth General Conference on Weights and 
Measures ruled the meter would be defined as the distance light travels in 
a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, simplifying it from the previous 
definition of 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in 
the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton- 86 atom in a vacuum. 



November 10, 1983 - Fred Cohen demonstrated a way to insert code into 
a Unix command in order to gain control of systems. His academic 
adviser, Len Adelman (the A in RSA) compares the self-replicating code 
to a virus. It wasn't the first code of its kind, but it's the one that inspired 
the name. 



November 10, 1983 - At the plaza hotel in New York, Bill Gates 
announced Windows. It originally was called Interface Manager until 
Rowland Hanson convinced Gates to change the name. It would take two 
years before Microsoft would put it on sale. 



November 13, 1983 - The MIT TX-0, an experimental transistorized 
computer, was brought back to life for the last time at The Computer 
Museum in Marlboro, Massachusetts. 



1984 



January 5, 1984 - Richard Stallman began working on the GNU Operating 
system, a free UNIX-like OS. GNU/Linux is seen as the most successful 
outgrowth of that project. 



January 22, 1984 - Apple aired the famous "1984" commercial for the 
Apple Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott. 



January 24, 1984 - The original Macintosh was introduced becoming the 
first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a 
graphical user interface rather than a command line interface. 



114 



February 7, 1984 - Challenger astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert 
L. Stewart made the first untethered spacewalks. 



May 14, 1984 - According to his Facebook profile Mark Zuckerberg was 
born in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He would grow up to found Facebook. 



June 6, 1984 — Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, is 
released. It was invented by a Soviet programmer, Alexei Pazhitnov and 
popularized by Hank Rogers who bought the rights and distributed it. 



August 26, 1984 - Miss Manners confronted her first computer issue. The 
columnist responded to a reader's concern about typing personal 
correspondence on a personal computer. 



October 20, 1984 - The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened in Monterey, 
California. It not only provided a world-class place to learn about sea life, 
but inspired millions of screensavers and wallpaper images. 



November 20, 1984 - The SETI Institute, the Search for Extraterrestrial 
Intelligence was founded by Thomas Pierson (CEO), and Dr. Jill Tarter. 
No luck so far, but they keep looking. 



1985 



January 1, 1985 - The Nordic Research Network NORDUnet registered 
the first domain name NORDU.NET. 



February 1, 1985 - Shordy after its founding the November before, the 
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence kicked off. SETI Institute began 
operations. 



115 



March 11, 1985 - The Southern New England Telephone Company 
turned on ConnNet, the nation's first local, public packet-switching 
network. Customers could access CompuServ, NewsNet and other 
services at a blistering 4,800 to 56,000 bits per second. The service's X.25 
protocol went obsolete in the 1990s with the popularity of the Internet 
Protocol. 



March 15, 1985 - Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, 
registered the Internet's first domain name, symbolics.com. An 
investment company who uses it as a marketing device now owns the 
domain. The remains of the original Symbolics Company survives in 
altered form at symbolics-dks.com. 



July 23, 1985 - Commodore introduced the Amiga personal computer at 
the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York's Lincoln Center. Amiga cost 
$1,295 and shipped with a base configuration of 256K of RAM. 



September 11, 1985 - ISEE-3, renamed the International Cometary 
Explorer (ICE) flew through the gas tail of comet P/Giacobini-Zinner. 



September 12, 1985 - Steve Jobs announced to the Apple board that he 
would resign. Jobs said, "I've been thinking a lot, and it's time for me to 
get on with my life. It's obvious that I've got to do something. I'm 30 
years old." 



September 13, 1985 - Nintendo released Super Mario Brothers in Japan. It 
became the best selling video game for 20 years until it was surpassed by 
Wii Sports. 



September 16, 1985 - Steve Jobs spent his last day as an employee of 
Apple after submitting his resignation to the board. 



October 3, 1985 - STS-51J lifted off Sending the Space Shutde Atlantis on 
its maiden flight. It was the fourth shuttle created and eventually became 
the last shuttle to fly in July 2011. 



116 



October 4, 1985 - Richard Stallman started a non-profit corporation called 
the Free Software Foundation, dedicated to promoting the universal 
freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF 
among other things enforces the copyleft requirements of the GNU 
General Public License often referred to as the GPL. 



October 13, 1985 - The first observation of a proton-antiproton collision 
was made by the Collider Detector at the Fermi National Accelerator 
Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. 



October 14, 1985 - The first official reference guide for the C++ 
programming language was published. The language's creator, Bjarne 
Stroustrup, wrote it. 



October 18, 1985 - Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment 
System aka the NES at FAO Schwarz in New York. A little game called 
Super Mario Brothers was introduced on the same day. The NES was the 
North American version of the Famicom sold in Japan. It was test- 
marketed in New York and eventually conquered the continent, becoming 
an 8-bit classic. 



November 20, 1985 - Microsoft finally released Version 1.0 of Windows. 
It was considered slighdy inferior to competitors like DESQview and the 
Macintosh. 



December 4, 1985 - The Cray X-MP/48 began operation at the San Diego 
Supercomputer Center. It almost doubled the speed of other machines 
with a parallel processing system, which ran at 420 megaflops. 



1986 



January 16, 1986 - The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) met for 
the first time in San Diego to supervise the design and deployment of 
Internet protocol. 



117 



January 19, 1986 - "Brain" became the first computer virus released into 
the wild. It was a boot sector virus transmitted by floppy disks. The 
Farooq Alvi Brothers of Lahore, Pakistan created the virus. 



February 20, 1986 — A Soviet Proton launcher boosted the base block of 
the Mir space station into orbit. 



February 21, 1986 - The Legend of Zelda, the first in the ongoing series, 
was released in Japan for Nintendo's Famicom console. 



February 27, 1986 — The United States Senate voted to allow its debates 
to be televised on a trial basis. The trial was successful. 



April 18, 1986 - Newspapers reported that IBM had become the first to 
use a megabit chip, a memory chip capable of storing 1 million bits of 
information, in its Model 3090. 



April 26, 1986 - Design flaws made worse by human error during a safety 
test, led to the worst nuclear disaster yet, and a partial meltdown at the 
Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. 



May 27, 1986 — Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combined the full- 
screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of 
Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games. 



June 9, 1986 - The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center opened to support 
the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, which linked five 
supercomputer centers. NSFNET would eventually allow commercial 
uses and transition to the open Internet. 



September 22, 1986 - In NEC Corp. Vs. Intel Corp., the US District 
Court for the Northern District of California ruled that microprograms 
are copyrightable literary works. And so all the trouble began. 



118 



December 23, 1986, - Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager touched down at 
Edwards Air Force Base in the experimental airplane Voyager, completing 
the first non-stop, round- the- world flight without refueling. 



1987 



March 18, 1987 - Thousands of physicists crowded a ballroom at the New 
York Hilton at the meeting of the American Physical society to hear 
speakers talk on high-temperature superconductivity. The session started 
in the evening and ran until 3:15 AM earning the nickname "Woodstock 
of Physics." 



May 30, 1987 - North American Philips Company introduced the 
compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized 
implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio. 



June 15, 1987 - CompuServe's Sandy Trevor and his team, which included 
inventor Steve Wilhite, released a GIF version 87a. The new enhanced 
format allowed people to create compressed animations. "Under 
Construction" GIFs everywhere became possible. 



October 30, 1987 - NEC started selling the first 16-bit home 
entertainment system, called the TurboGrafx-16 Entertainment 
SuperSystem or in Japan, the shorter catchier PC Engine. It was originally 
more popular in Japan than the FamiCom, which we North Americans 
call the NES. 



December 9, 1987 - Microsoft released Windows 2.0, which among other 
improvements could run the first Windows versions of Microsoft Word 
and Microsoft Excel. 



1988 



April 21, 1988 - Tandy Corp. held a press conference in New York to 
announce its plans to build IBM PS/2 clones. 



119 



May 8, 1988 - A fire broke out in the main switching room of the 
Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company, causing a 
telephone service outage for more than 40,000 local phone lines. It was 
considered at the time to be the 'worst telecommunications disaster in US 
telephone industry history.' 



August 4, 1988 - A computer halted an engine test in preparation for the 
launch of the space shuttle Discovery. The flight would be the first since 
the Challenger explosion in 1986. 



1989 



February 14, 1989 - The Department of Defense put the NAVSTAR III 
into orbit, the first of 24 satellites that will make up the global positioning 
system. 



July 26, 1989 - Cornell student Robert Tappan Morris became the first 
person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after releasing 
a worm on the Internet. Morris claimed his worm was just measuring the 
size of the Internet. 



August 16, 1989 - A solar flare created a geomagnetic storm that caused 
three hard drives to fail in an otherwise fault-tolerant system at the 
Toronto Stock Exchange to fail. This prevented access to critical market 
data leading the exchange to be shut down for three hours. 



August 27, 1989 - The first direct- to-home TV satellite launched from 
Cape Canaveral. Marco Polo I delivered the British Satellite Broadcasting 
service to homes in the UK. 



September 19, 1989 - About 100 hospitals that used software from Shared 
Medical Systems saw their computers go into a loop when the date was 
entered. The day was 32,768 days from January 1, 1900, which caused a 
system overflow. 



120 



THE NINETIES 



1990 



April 24, 1990 - The Space Shuttle Discovery launched with the Hubble 
Space Telescope on board. The following day, Hubble was released into 
space 



May 20, 1990 - The Hubble Space Telescope sends its first light image 
back to Earth, taken with the wide field/planetary camera. 



May 22, 1990 - Microsoft released Windows 3.0. It featured big 
improvements in interface and multitasking. It's Control Panel feature 
caught the eye of Apple, which sued, and lost. 



July 10, 1990 - The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formally founded, 
immediately coming to the aid of Steve Jackson Games, who's BBS had 
been seized by the Secret Service. 



July 25, 1990 - Microsoft became the first software company to exceed I 
billion in sales in a single year, reporting revenues of SI. 18 billion for 
fiscal year 1990. 



August 10, 1990 - The Magellan space probe, named after Ferdinand 
Magellan, reached Venus, beginning its mission to map the planet's 
surface. 



August 29, 1990 - The British Computer Misuse Act went into effect. The 
Act resulted from a long debate in the 1980s over failed prosecutions of 
hackers. 



121 



September 10, 1990 - Peter Deutsch posted to comp. archives about the 
Internet Archive Server called "Archie" that he, Alan Emtage, and Bill 
Heelan had put together. It is often considered the Internet's first search 
engine. 



October 17, 1990 - Col Needham posted a software package to 

rec. arts. movies called at the time rec. arts. movies movie database that 

made the lists of movies on the newsgroup searchable. It would move to 

the web in 1992 and became known as IMDB, the Internet Movie 

Database. 



November 12, 1990 - Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for a 
hypertext project. The proposal refers to a "web of information nodes" 
and implementing "browsers" The project eventually became the World 
Wide Web. 



December 25, 1990 - Tim Berners-Lee with help from CERN computer 
scientist Robert Cailliau and others — set up the first successful 
communication between a Web browser and server via the Internet. 



1991 



March 19, 1991 - US patent No. 5,000,000 was issued for a process 
turning garbage into fuel to microbiologist Lonnie. O. Ingram of the 
University of Florida. His method depended on the creation of a new 
species of bacterium genetically formed from two other bacteria. 



April 8, 1991 - A team moved from Sun Microsystems to work in secret 
on its "Oak" development project, which was later renamed "Java." 



July 1, 1991 - Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri made the world's first 
GSM call over a privately operated network to Vice Mayor Kaarina 
Suonio in Tampere. The Prime Minister used Nokia gear on GSM's 
original 900MHz band. 



122 



August 6, 1991 - Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of his 
WorldWideWeb Project to alt.hypertext and pointed to a simple browser 
and a Web page describing the project. Thus the WWW became a publicly 
available service on the Internet. 



August 25, 1991 - 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Torvalds wrote a 
newsgroup post about a free operating system he was working on. He said 
it was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu." His OS 
would eventually be called Linux. 



August 28, 1991 - The crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis sent an 
electronic mail message using AppleLink. The message read: "Hello Earth! 
Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first Applelink from space. 
Having a GREAT time, wish you were here!" 



September 10, 1991 - Paul Lindner posted to comp.unix.misc introducing 
"The Internet Gopher" a distributed information service. Before the 
World Wide Web, Gopher was the prime way to find and share 
documents online. 



September 17, 1991 — The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) was 
posted to a Finnish FTP server in Helsinki. Originator Linus Torvalds 
wanted to call the OS FreaX, but the FTP admin didn't like the name and 
renamed it Linux. 



September 26, 1991 - Eight people entered Biosphere 2, an airtight replica 
of the Earth's biosphere in Oracle, Arizona. They left exactly two years 
later in 1993. Results of the experiment are still controversial. 



October 5, 1991 - Linux Kernel, version 0.02 was released, attracting a lot 
of attention. Author Linus Torvalds felt this version was at least usable 
and worth a wider release. 



December 12, 1991 - Paul Kunz sets up the first website in North 
America. It searched particle physics literature at Stanford. 



123 



1992 



January 9, 1992 - Apple CEO John Sculley coined the term Personal 
Digital Assistants, or PDA, and indicated Apple would get into the 
business of making them later that year. 



March 6, 1992 — The first media- hyped computer virus reached fever 
pitch as the Michelangelo boot sector virus began to affect computers. 
Worldwide catastrophe did not follow. 



April 6, 1992 - Microsoft released Windows 3.1. It sold for $149 and 
added support for sound cards, MIDI, and CD Audio, Super VGA (800 
600) monitors, and support for 9600 bps modems. 



May 5, 1992 - Id Software released Wolfenstein 3-D. It wasn't the original 
first person shooter, but it launched the form into widespread popularity. 



May 14, 1992 - Texas Instruments decided to take on the dominance of 
Intel, announcing its own 486 microprocessor chip. Cyrix corp. designed 
the chip for TI, but it proved unsuccessful in weakening Intel's 
dominance. 



May 29, 1992 - John Sculley introduced the Apple Newton at CES. The 
first one unveiled on stage had dead batteries and didn't work. 



July 18, 1992 - Silvano de Gennaro, an IT developer at CERN took a 
picture of the singing group 'Les Horribles Cernettes' who sang mostly 
about physics. Tim Berners-Lee would later use that picture as a test, 
making it the first photo uploaded to the World Wide Web. 



October 26, 1992 - Software deployment issues in CAD, the new 
ambulance dispatch system in London caused 30-45 deaths. Poor training, 
a memory leak and no load testing contributed to the failure. 



November 3, 1992 - Tim Berners-Lee posted a page describing the World 
Wide Web. It's the oldest page still served on the Web. 



124 



1993 



March 22, 1993 — The Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips 
featuring 60 and 66 MHz CPUs. 



March 31, 1993 - Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 identical 
messages to news. admin. policy while testing some auto-moderation 
software. It became the first USENET postings to be referred to as spam. 



April 22, 1993 - NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released, becoming the first web 
browser to achieve popularity among the general public. 



April 30, 1993 — CERN released a statement declaring the software 
protocols developed for the World Wide Web would be available in the 
public domain. 



June 24, 1993 - "Severe Tire Damage," conducted the first known 
Internet concert. The band set their gear up on the patios of the Xerox 
Palo Alto Research Center and sent their show out on the Internet 
Multicast Backbone, or Mbone. 



July 27, 1993 - Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1, completing its 
attempt to build an advanced 32-bit operating system from scratch. 



August 16, 1993 - Ian Murdock announced the Debian Linux distribution 
system. The name combined his then girlfriend Debra's name with his, 
Deb-Ian. And now you know how to properly pronounce it. 



August 21, 1993 - NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer three days 
before it was supposed to enter orbit. As it began to pressurize fuel tanks, 
the spacecraft's transmitters went silent and it was never heard from 
again. 



125 



August 23, 1993 - Nintendo agreed to use Silicon Graphics Inc. 
technology in a video game player it was developing. 



September 3, 1993 - Infogear filed an application for a US trademark on 
"I PHONE" for its "communications terminals. The company would 
later register "IPhone" as well. Cisco acquired Infogear in 2000 and later 
worked out a deal with Apple to share the name. 



September 24, 1993 - Broderbund Software released the game Myst, for 
the Macintosh computer. It became a record-setting bestseller and helped 
popularize CD-ROM drives. 



December 2, 1993 — NASA launched the Space Shutde Endeavour on a 
mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, turning the Hubble from a 
late night talk show joke to the source of some of the most beautiful and 
valuable astronomy yet done. 



December 8, 1993 - The US Secretary of Defense declared the GPS 
system a dual use system that had Initial Operation Capability and opened 
the Standard Positioning System to civilians, which gave accuracy of 9 
meters horizontally. 



1994 



March 7, 1994 — The Supreme Court found that 2 Live Crew's parody of 
Roy Orbison's "Oh Pretty Woman" was fair use, and not a violation of 
copyright, thus ensuring the future of The Onion. 



March 14, 1994 — Linus Torvalds posted to comp.os.linux. announce that 
Linux kernel release 1.0. had arrived. 



April 4, 1994 - Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark found Mosaic 
Communications Corp, which they later renamed Netscape 
Communications Corp. Andreesen developed the Mosaic browser while 
at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the 
University of Illinois. 



126 



April 12, 1994 - Immigration Lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel 
intentionally posted to more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups about 
their green card services. It is considered the first occurrence of 
commercial spam. 



May 23, 1994 - Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the programming 
language Java and the accompanying Web browser Hotjava at the 
SunWorld '95 convention. 



May 25, 1994 - CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web 
conference, which continued through May 27. 



August 15, 1994 - Microsoft programmer Benjamin Slivka sent an email 
to his team suggesting they make a Web browser for Windows 95. 



August 31, 1994 - Stockholders approved the merger of Aldus Corp. and 
Adobe Systems Inc. It united the two driving forces behind desktop 
publishing software. Aldus Pagemaker became Adobe Pagemaker. 



September 1, 1994 - The United States Library of Congress held the first 
of several meetings to plan the conversion of its materials to digital form 
to make them accessible by computer networks. 



September 12, 1994 - Mosaic Communications introduced its first 
software, the Mosaic NetScape network navigator and the Mosaic Netsite 
server line. 



September 29, 1994 - Programmers first demonstrated the Hotjava 
prototype browser to executives at Sun Microsystems Inc. It was an 
attempt to port the Java language to the Web. It worked. 



October 27, 1994 - HotWired (later to become Wired.com) launched 
bringing with it the first large quantity sales of banner ads. AT&T, Zima, 
MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-COLLECT all plunked down for the 
privilege. 



127 



November 5, 1994 - Ken McCarthy of the Internet Gazette along with 
Marc Andreessen of the brand new Netscape (still called Mosaic 
Communications Corp) and Mark Graham held the first conference to 
focus on the commercial potential of the World Wide Web. 



November 7, 1994 - University of North Carolina student radio station 
WXYC began what is considered the world's first Internet radio 
broadcast. DJ Michael Shoffner set it up. The simulcast continues as of 
2012. 



December 3, 1994 - The Sony PlayStation game console went on sale in 
Japan 



December 15, 1994 - Netscape shipped version 1.0 of the Netscape 
Navigator Web browser. 



1995 



February 9, 1995 - Dr. Bernard Harris became the first African-American 
to walk in space. Joining him, Michael Foale became the first British-born 
American to walk in space. 



February 15, 1995 - The FBI arrested Kevin Mitnick on charges of wire 
fraud and breaking into the computer systems of several major 
corporations. 

February 22, 1995 - Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett completed the first 
hot air balloon flight over Pacific Ocean. At 9600 km it was also the 
longest balloon flight. 



February 22, 1 995 — President Clinton signed an Executive Order 
directing the declassification of intelligence imagery acquired by the 
CORONA, ARGON and LANYARD US photo-reconnaissance 
satellites. More than 860,000 images of the Earth's surface, collected 
between 1960 and 1972 were made public. 



128 



March 1, 1995 - A little over a year after starting the website in January 
1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporated Yahoo! 



March 25, 1995 - Ward Cunningham installed the First Wiki, 
WikiWikiWeb on a $300 computer someone gave him. He connected it to 
the Internet, using a 14.4-baud dial-up modem. 



April 27, 1995 - The Justice Department sued to block Microsoft's 
purchase of Intuit, claiming the acquisition would raise prices and squash 
innovation. Intuit still exists but Microsoft Money is long gone. 



May 4, 1995 - German electronics company Escom AG bought the rights 
to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics 
Ltd. for $10 million. Commodore had gone bankrupt the year before. 



May 8, 1995 - The New York Times announced it would join eight other 
newspapers in the New Century Network. The network aimed to connect 
local online news services into a national service on the Web. 



May 26, 1995 - Bill Gates authored an internal memo entitled "The 
Internet Tidal Wave" calling the Internet the most important development 
since the IBM personal computer. Microsoft soon got to work on its own 
Web browser. 



June 6, 1995 - The Los Angeles Times reported that Father Leonard 
Boyle was working to put the Vatican's library on the World Wide Web 
through a site funded by IBM. 



June 27, 1995 - Spyglass Inc. went public, the year after it began 
distributing its Spyglass Mosaic Web browser. The Spyglass browser 
powered the first version of Internet Explorer and had code in IE all the 
way up to IE 7. 



June 29, 1995 - The Space Shuttle Adantis docked with the space station 
Mir, the first-ever docking of a Shuttle to a Space Station. 



129 



August 9, 1995 - Netscape Communications staged an IPO. Shares 
opened at $28 and shot up to $75 per share in one day, becoming one of 
the indicators of the beginning of the dot-com boom. 



August 16, 1995 - The first version Microsoft's Web browser, Internet 
Explorer 1, debuted. It was based on Mosaic, which Microsoft had 
licensed from Spyglass Inc. 



August 24, 1995 - Microsoft released Windows 95. During development it 
was referred to as Windows 4.0 or by the internal codename "Chicago." 



September 19, 1995 - International Talk Like a Pirate Day was first 
celebrated by John Baur (Ol' Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n 
Slappy), of Albany, Oregon. They had come up with the idea on June 6th 
while playing racquetball, but that was D-Day. They chose the 19th 
because it was Summers' ex-wife's birthday, and the only day he could 
reliably remember. 



October 10, 1995 - The Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology wrapped up "A Day in the Life of Cyberspace" an attempt 
to chronicle what people did online that day. 



October 23, 1995 - A federal judge for the first time authorized a wiretap 
of a computer network, leading to hacking charges against a young 
Argentinean for brealdng into sensitive US government networks. 



November 22, 1995 - The first feature-length film created entirely using 
computer-generated imagery was released to theaters. Toy Story grossed 
more than $350 million worldwide, making executive producer Steve Jobs, 
very happy. 



November 27, 1995 - Microsoft released Internet Explorer 2.0, touting its 
privacy and encryption, and stepping up the browser war with Netscape. 



130 



1996 



February 8, 1996 -John Perry Barlow posted "A Declaration of the 
Independence of Cyberspace" written in Davos, Switzerland. He foresaw 
a "civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair 
than the world your governments have made before." 



February 8, 1996 - The US Congress passed the Communications 
Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In part, it 
attempted to hold website operators responsible for anyone younger than 
18 seeing porn on the Internet. That provision was later struck down by 
the Supreme Court, however Section 230 which provides safe harbor to 
service providers is still in force. 



February 10, 1996 - Chess's international grandmaster Garry Kasparov 
began a six game match against IBM's Deep Blue. Deep Blue won the 
first game, the first time that a current world champion had ever been 
beaten by a computer opponent under regular tournament conditions. 



February 17, 1996 - World chess champion Garry Kasparov defeated 
Deep Blue in game 6 winning the match 4-2. He would lose the next 
match. 



February 29, 1996 - Microprose released Civilization II, a sequel to Sid 
Meier's Civilization, and the version that would launch the franchise to 
widespread popularity. 

March 23, 1996 - The US space shuttle Adantis docked with the Russian 
space station Mir for the third time, and for the first time dropped off a 
US astronaut. Shannon Lucid began her record-breaking stay on the 
space station. 



April 14, 1996 -Jennifer Kaye Ringley hooked up a camera in her dorm 
room at Dickinson College and set it to upload a picture every three 
minutes as an experiment. The JenniCam would eventually reach 4 million 
hits per day at its peak. 



131 



May 30, 1996 - AT&T announced they finally had a system that would 
allow computers to make and receive videophone calls over standard 
telephone lines. It was not called Skype. It did not catch on. 



July 4, 1996 - Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched a free web email 
service called HoTMaiL, a play on HTML. Microsoft bought it a year 
later, but still calls it Hotmail. 



July 6, 1996 - AOL setded lawsuits in California that accused the company 
of misleading subscribers about monthly service charges. 



July 23, 1996 - The first commercial HDTV signal was broadcast in North 
Carolina by WRAL channel 32 operating at 100 kilowatts with an antenna 
1,750 feet above the ground. 200 members of the press watched the 
broadcast at WRAL. 



July 26, 1996 - Microsoft releases Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 3.0, touting 
customization options like parental controls and the ability to handle 
shared applications and Web phone calls. 



August 26, 1996 - Netscape Communications Corp. announced it had 
partnered with several other big companies to create a software company 
called Navio Corp. Navio was meant to create an operating system to 
compete with Windows. 



September 1, 1996 - Apple released its Pippin game console in the US. 
The idea was to provide an inexpensive game-focused computer. Apple 
licensed third parties like Bandai to make Pippin consoles. 



September 27, 1996 - Kevin Mitnick was indicted on charges he broke 
into the systems of major software companies, and then transferred stolen 
material to computers at USC via the Internet. Seems prosaic today, but 
was unheard of at the time. 



October 2, 1996 - US President Bill Clinton signed amendments to the 
Freedom of Information Act requiring the US government to make 
electronic documents available online. 



132 



November 7, 1996 - NASA launched the Mars global surveyor, 
humanities return to Mars after a 10-year absence. The mission 
discovered much about the Geology of the planet. 



December 4, 1996 - General Motors began delivery of the EV1, an 
electric vehicle that would become well loved by its drivers then be taken 
back in 2002 and sent to car-crushers. 



December 14, 1996 -John Tu and David Sun, the founders of Kingston 
Technology took $100 million from the sale of their privately held 
enterprise and gave it to employees — a spontaneous gesture to those 
who had helped make the memory-module company a market leader. 



December 20, 1996 - Apple announced it would acquire NeXT Computer 
and bring co-founder Steve Jobs back to the company he left in 1985. 



1997 



February 11, 1997 - The Space Shuttle Discovery launched on Mission 
STS-82 with the objective of making significant upgrades to the scientific 
capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope. The upgrades helped turn the 
Hubble from a punchline, to one of the greatest telescopes ever created. 



April 1, 1997 - Dave Winer changed how he displayed 'Scripting News' so 
that it always showed the last ten days worth of posts. In other words the 
way every blog does it now. Whether this makes it the 'first blog' or not it 
was extremely influential and is definitely one of the oldest blogs out 
there, predating the term blog, of course. 



May 3, 1997 - In New York City, Gary Kasparov began his re-match 
match against IBM's Deep Blue computer. He had won the previous 
match in February 1996 4-2. 



133 



May 11, 1997 - Deep Blue won its final match against Chess master Garry 
Kasparov, becoming the first computer to defeat a chess champion in 
match play. 



June 11, 1997 - Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of 
his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more 
than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital 
camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf. 



June 12, 1997 - 3Com Corp. and US Robotics Corp. completed their 
merger. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 
3Com's interface cards. 



June 17, 1997 - Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable 
Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption 
software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet 
and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption 
was needed. 



June 26, 1997 - The US Supreme Court struck down a portion of the 
Communications Decency Act as violating the first amendment protecting 
free speech. 



July 17, 1997 - DNS was widely disrupted making email routing and web 
page delivery spotty throughout the day. An Ingres database failure 
resulted in corrupt .COM and .NET zone files. A system administrator 
mistakenly released the zone file without regenerating the file and 
verifying its integrity. 



July 22, 1997 - Apple announced OS 8 for Macintosh computers. It added 
easier Internet integration and a 3D look to the OS. 



July 28, 1997 - Dell announced its entry into the workstation market with 
the Dell Workstation 400. 



134 



August 6, 1997 - At MacWorld in Boston, Microsoft announced it would 
invest $150 million in Apple, and continue to make Microsoft Office for 
Mac for at least five years. The two companies also ended their lawsuit. 



August 31, 1997 - The developer release of Apple's new OS, code name 
GraillZ4 / TitanlU was released. It was known formally as Rhapsody and 
would evolve into OS X.. 



September 2, 1997 - IBM announced that its RS/6000 SP model parallel 
supercomputer, was now 58 percent faster than Deep Blue, the computer 
that beat Kasparov at chess. 



September 6, 1997 - The US Navy in San Francisco commissioned the 
USS Grace Murray Hopper, a guided missile destroyer named after the 
computer pioneer. 



September 16, 1997 - After purchasing NeXT the previous December, 
bringing Steve Jobs back to the company, the Apple Board named Jobs as 
interim CEO, replacing Gil Amelio. 



September 24, 1997 - Ultima Online launched, revolutionizing online 
gaming by supporting thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent 
shared world. 



December 17, 1997 -John Barger coined the term 'weblog' to describe his 
list of links on his site Robot Wisdom. Peter Merholz would later shorten 
it to just 'blog'. 



December 18, 1997 - HTML 4.0 was recommended and published by the 
World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. It offered the strict, transitional 
and frameset variations, and deprecated many of Netscape's visual tags in 
favor of CSS. 



135 



1998 



February 4, 1998 - Noel Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pie-ing 
rich and famous people struck a pie against the face of Bill Gates. Gates 
did not press charges. 



March 31, 1998 - After three years of development and much wrangling 
with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard released the 
iconic game Starcraft. 



April 5, 1998 - Long before texting or cell phones while driving were 
considered a danger, a driver in Marseilles, France was distracted by her 
Tamagotchi virtual pet. She ran into a group of cyclists killing one and 
injuring one other. 



April 27, 1998 - Roughly 8,000 AOL subscribers joined the first known 
live interspecies chat with Koko the gorilla. Koko signed her answers; 
Penny Patterson interpreted them; and an AOL chat facilitator entered 
them in the computer. 



May 18, 1998 - The United States Department of Justice and twenty US 
states filed civil actions against Microsoft, alleging the company abused 
monopoly power regarding operating system and Web browser sales. 



June 11, 1998 — Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what 
remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had 
brought the world PDP and VAX. 



June 25, 1998 - Microsoft released Windows 98 with less hype than 
Windows 95, but more consumer focus. Windows 98 was the last version 
of Windows that was based on DOS. 



July 3, 1998 - Danielle Bunten Berry died of lung cancer. She was a 
pioneering game designer most famous for creating the multiplayer game 
M.U.L.E. in 1983. 



136 



September 4, 1998 — Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation of 
Google, allowing them to cash a $100,000 check Andy Bechtolsheim, co- 
founder of Sun, had written to Google Inc. 



September 11, 1998 - The US Congress released the contents of the Starr 
report on the internet. The report led to the impeachment but not the 
removal of President Clinton. The websites that hosted the report were 
slammed with traffic. 



September 18, 1998 — The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and 
Numbers aka ICANN was created in order to take over Internet 
administrative tasks from the US Government. The most famous of those 
tasks is overseeing the Domain Name System. 

September 28, 1998 - Microsoft's Internet Explorer passed Netscape 
Navigator as the Web browser with the greatest market share, according 
to a report from the International Data Corporation. 



October 24, 1998 - NASA Launched Deep Space 1, it's mission to seek 
out an asteroid, specifically, asteroid 9969 Braille. When that mission 
ended up being only partially successful, it went after Comet Borrelly 
where it got some choice information. 



October 28, 1998 - A different Bill, President Bill Clinton signed into law 
the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, making it illegal for you to use 
computers the way they were designed to be used, if big companies didn't 
want you to. 



October 29, 1998 - The Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off on STS-95 
with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to 
go into space. 



November 20, 1998 - The first module of the International Space Station 
launched. Zarya, also called the Functional Cargo Block, provided 
electrical power, storage and propulsion. It's now consigned to being used 
for storage. 



137 



November 24, 1998 - AOL announced it would purchase Netscape 
Communications, merging what were then two of the biggest names on 
the Internet. 



December 4, 1998 - The space shuttle Endeavour lifted off from Cape 
Canaveral, carrying the first American-built component of the 
International Space Station, a connecting node, known as Unity. 



December 11, 1998 - The Mars Climate Orbiter was successfully launched 
on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida. 
However, the probe disappeared on September 23rd before reaching 
Mars, apparently destroyed because scientists had failed to convert 
English measures to metric values. 



1999 



January 3, 1999 - The US Mars Polar Lander was launched. It would 
spend most of the year wending its way towards Mars before it lost 
communication with Earth in December, presumably after crashing. 



February 5, 1999 - The first Victoria's Secret online fashion show became 
the first major webcast, attracting an estimated 1.5 million viewers 
worldwide. Proving even back then the Internet is for shopping. 



March 16, 1999 Sony released Everquest the Massively multiplayer 3D 
world where you could play as a wizard, rogue or knight. It followed two 
years after Ultima Online. 



March 16, 1999 - Mac OS X Server 1.0, the highly anticipated precursor 
of OS X desktop version (code name Hera) was released. 



March 21,1999 — Dr. Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Briton 
Brian Jones landed their Breitling Orbiter 3 just after 8 AM local time 300 
miles southwest of Cairo, Egypt. They became the first people to 
circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon. 



138 



March 26, 1999 - The "Melissa" worm showed up in a file on the alt.sex 
usenet group and became the first successful mass-mailing worm. The 
worm's creator, David L. Smith, apparendy named the worm after a lap 
dancer in Florida. 



May 5, 1999 - Microsoft shipped Windows 98 SE to manufacturers. The 
new version included Internet Connection Sharing, Internet Explorer 5, 
Windows NetMeeting 3. 



May 29, 1999 — Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with 
the International Space Station. 



June 1, 1999 - The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster 
was released. 



June 22, 1999 - Nature Neuroscience published the first demonstration of 
live rats directly controlling a robot arm with their thoughts. 



July 3, 1999 - At the Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, New 
Hampshire, Billy Mitchell became the first ever to achieve a perfect score 
on Pac-Man. 



In 1999 - The Sega Dreamcast debuted in North America. However many 
were distracted by the supposed 9/9/99 bug that ended up being just as 
much of a non-problem as the Y2K bug. 



September 21, 1999 - Google came out of beta. The young company 
announced its new Google Scout feature and the launch of its new 
website, removing the beta designation from the Google search engine. 



September 23, 1999 - NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. 
It began orbit normally, but after it went behind the planet and out of 
range, it never made contact again. It was later determined that the 
approach attitude was wrong because software put out imperial units 
instead of metric units. 



139 



November 30, 1999 - British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems 
merged to form BAE Systems, Europe's largest defense contractor and 
the fourth largest aerospace firm in the world. Guglielmo Marconi had 
founded Marconi in 1897. 



December 3, 1999 - NASA lost radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander 
moments before the spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere. 



December 7, 1999 - Six months after its birth, Napster is sued by the 
Recording Industry Association of America. The Industry refuses to 
settle, thus insuring that digital music sales will remain low for years to 
come. 



December 24, 1999 - The very seasonal HTML 4.01 was published by the 
World Wide Web Consortium. HTML 4.01 remained the current HTML 
standard for well over a decade. 



140 



THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 



2000 



February 17, 2000 - Microsoft released Windows 2000, the successor to 
Windows NT 4.0, and the final Windows release to display the "Windows 
NT" designation. 



March 4, 2000 - The Sony PlayStation 2 game console went on sale in 
Japan. 

March 10, 2000 -The NASDAQ hit 5,048.62, the highest point of the dot- 
com boom. The bust began the next day. 



April 3, 2000 — US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled violated 
the nation's antitrust laws by using its monopoly power in personal 
computer operating systems to stifle competition. 



April 13, 2000 - Heavy metal band Metallica launched their lawsuit against 
Napster for enabling thievery and copyright infringement. It was the 
beginning of the end for Napster and all music piracy. Well, at least for 
Napster. 



April 22, 2000 — The Big Number Change took place in the United 
Kingdom, changing how phone numbers were dialed in many areas. With 
the boom in mobile devices the UK had almost exhausted all possible 
numbers, and needed the change to increase the pool of numbers to be 
assigned. 



May 2, 2000 — The United States government shut off Selective Access of 
the GPS system. That meant accurate positioning was no longer restricted 
to the US military. Positioning accuracy on the first day without Selective 
Access went from a 45-meter radius to a 6-meter radius. 



141 



May 3, 2000 - A "geocache" was hidden outside Beaver Creek, Oregon, 
kicking off the first "Great American GPS Stash Hunt" and the hobby 
now called geocachinp;. 



May 4, 2000 - The "I Love You" virus spread to 55 million computers 
around the world, hijacking hard drives and deleting, renaming, or 
damaging files. The damage reached billions of dollars. 



June 24, 2000 - President Clinton gave his weekly radio address live on the 
Internet for the first time. 



July 28, 2000 - Ted Kekatos celebrated the first System Administrator 
Appreciation Day. He had been inspired by an HP ad showing people 
bringing gifts to their System Administrator. The day is celebrated 
annually on the last Friday of July. 



August 17, 2000 - Niels en /NetRatings announced that according to their 
data, more than half (52%) of United States households had Internet 
access for the first time. This backed up Media Metrix's report from April, 
which estimated that 51% of US households now had Internet access. 



September 13, 2000 - The public beta of Apple's Mac OS X, code named 
Kodiak was released. Users had to pay $29.95 for the beta. 



September 14, 2000 - Microsoft released Windows ME. The ME stood 
for Millennium Edition but deserving or not, would eventually become 
code for a bad or unnecessary OS update. 



September 21, 2000 - Kevin Mitnick was released from a Lompoc, 
California prison after almost five years of incarceration. 



October 31, 2000 - The Soyuz TM-31 launched, carrying Expedition 1 the 
first resident crew to the International Space Station, including Yuri 
Gidzenko, Sergei Krikalev and William Shepherd. The TM-31 was used as 
the crew's lifeboat while on the station. 



142 



October 31, 2000 - Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and Napster agreed 
to develop a service for swapping and sharing music. The service never 
materialized. 



November 1 6, 2000 - ICANN announced its decision to include 7 new 
top-level domains giving birth to the .aero, .biz, .coop, info, .museum, 
.name and .pro, TLDs. 



2001 



January 9, 2001 - Apple introduced iTunes for the Macintosh, featuring 
CD ripping, digital music organizing, and Internet radio. 



January 11, 2001 - AOL and Time Warner completed their merger. At the 
time it was seen as a signal of the victory of the Internet over old media. 
Time Warner would eventually come out on top and spin AOL back out 
as separate company. 

January 15, 2001 - Wikipedia, the free Wild content encyclopedia, went 
online as a feeder project for Nupedia, an expert- written online 
encyclopedia. 



January 28, 2001 - The Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants faced 
off in Tampa Bay, Florida, for Super Bowl XXXV, and facial- recognition 
surveillance cameras pointed at tens of thousands of fans entering the 
game. It found 12 false positives. 



February 12, 2001 — The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on 
433 Eros after transmitting 69 close up pictures. It became the first 
spacecraft to land on an asteroid. 



February 13, 2001 - Microsoft gave the first public look at their new 
version of Windows, called Windows XP, formerly codenamed Whisder. 



143 



March 23, 2001 — The final commands to light the engines of the Progress 
supply ship were sent to the Russian Mir space station, which then broke 
up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near 
Fiji. 



March 24, 2001 - Apple released its new operating system Mac OS X, 
code named Cheetah, with a retail price of $130. 



April 28, 2001 - Dennis Tito became the first "space tourist" in human 
history paying his own way to the International Space Station aboard a 
Russian Soyuz spacecraft. 



July 2, 2001 - Bram Cohen first revealed BitTorrent on a Yahoo group 
called decentralization. 



July 5, 2001 - Rob Flickenger and friends posted details of their now 
legendary 12db Pringles-can antenna to boost WiFi signal distance. 



July 18, 2001 - Apple announced Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first update to 

osx. 



August 24, 2001 - WebKit received its first commit of code from Apple. 
The Safari browser appeared two years later and WebKit was open 
sourced in 2005. 



September 2, 2001 - At ECTS in London, Blizzard announced an online 
RPG version of its popular Warcraft franchise, called "World of 
Warcraft". 



September 14, 2001 - The Nintendo GameCube went on sale in Japan. It 
was the first Nintendo game console that did not use cartridges. 



September 25, 2001 - Apple announced the release of Mac OS X 10.1 
Puma, the first major upgrade to OS X. 



144 



October 12, 2001 - The end of an era as the Polaroid Corporation files for 
federal bankruptcy protection, killed off by 1-hour developing and the rise 
of digital cameras. Bank One bought most of the company and re- 
launched a company that went on to stop making cameras and film. 



October 23, 2001 - Apple announced their new music player, the iPod. 
Apple used PortalPlayer's reference platform and hired Pixo to design and 
implement the user interface. The iPod became the first massively 
successful digital music player. 



October 25, 2001 - Microsoft Windows XP hit retail shelves for the first 
time. 



November 10, 2001 - The first Apple iPod went on sale. Analysts agreed 
that the price of $399 was too high, and Apple was too inexperienced in 
consumer electronics to make it a success. 



November 15, 2001 - Microsoft entered the game console war with the 
first Xbox going on sale in North America. It pitted Microsoft against 
Sony's PS2 just three days before Nintendo's GameCube went on sale. 



November 27, 2001 - Scientists announced they had used the Hubble 
telescope to detect and analyze the atmosphere on an extrasolar planet for 
the first time. The planet HD 209458 b, unofficially called Osiris was 
found to have sodium in its atmosphere. 



December 3, 2001 - In Bryant Park in Manhattan, Inventor Dean Kamen 
unveiled the secret project with the codenamed "Ginger" that Steve Jobs 
reportedly said would cause cities to be re-architected. The Segway 
Personal Transporter has become iconic for mall cops and mailmen. 



December 31, 2001 - Microsoft provided its last day of support for 
Windows 95 making it officially "obsolete" according to the Microsoft 
Lifecycle policy, after only 6 years. 



145 



2002 



February 19, 2002 - Odyssey, the first of six straight operational Mars 
vehicles began its mission to map the planet. 



May 6, 2002 - Apple's Steve Jobs previewed Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar during 
his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It featured a handwriting 
technology dubbed Inkwell, an iChat instant messenger client, QuickTime 
6 integration and more. 



June 5, 2002 - Mozilla.org announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, an open- 
source browser built on the Gecko engine that also powered Netscape. 



June 1 8, 2002 - Kevin Warwick had his chip removed. Warwick implanted 
the chip earlier that year in order to experiment with human-computer 
interaction, culminating in a direct connection to his wife. 



July 17, 2002 - Apple announced PC versions of the iPod with 
MusicMatch software instead of iTunes. The company also announced a 
20 GB version of the music player and touch-sensitive scroll wheel and 
dropped the prices. 



July 21, 2002 - WorldCom filed for the largest Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 
US history. It was the number two long-distance phone company, at a 
time when that still meant something. It would end up changing its name 
back to MCI, and its remains exists as Verizon's business division. 



September 23, 2002 — Mozilla Phoenix 0.1 was released. It was the first 
public version of the web browser without mail or web editor, which 
would become Mozilla Firefox. 



December 16, 2002 - Creative Commons formally launched, unveiling 
Machine-Readable Copyright Licenses and a revamped website. 



146 



2003 



January 23, 2003 - Earth lost communication with space probe Pioneer 10 
which was 12 billion-kilometers from Earth. 



April 10, 2003 - British Airways and Air France announced the retirement 
of all Concorde supersonic jets. After a quarter century of supersonic 
speeds, passengers in the 21st century would go slower than those who 
flew in the late 20th century. 



April 25, 2003 — 50 years after Watson and Crick presented their findings 
on DNA in the publication Nature, the Human Genome Project 
concluded sequencing the genome and published a follow-on in Nature 
on their vision for genetic research. 



April 28, 2003 - Apple opened the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs 
at 99 cents apiece. Songs could play back on any iPod and up to 3 
authorized Macs. Windows users were out of luck but tracks could be 
burned to unlimited numbers of CDs. 



April 28, 2003 - Apple unveiled the "third-generation" iPod. The new 
iPods were thinner and featured the still used bottom Dock Connector 
port rather than the top-mounted FireWire port. The iPod controls also 
became entirely touch sensitive. 



June 2, 2003 — The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express 
probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest 
planetary probe to be built. 



June 10, 2003 — The Spirit Rover launched on a Delta II rocket, beginning 
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. 



June 19, 2003 - Apple released dock connector-to-USB 2.0 cables and 
drivers for third-generation iPods. Previous iPods had been FireWire only. 



147 



June 20, 2003 — The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. 
Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects 
like Wikipedia. 



July 15, 2003 - AOL Time Warner disbanded the Netscape browser 
development team. In conjunction, Mozilla created the Mozilla 
Foundation giving the project its first independent legal existence. 



August 27, 2003 - Fairbanks, Alaska got the world's biggest UPS backup. 
The city hooked up the world's largest storage battery, built to provide an 
uninterrupted power supply of 40 megawatts. 



October 1 , 2003 - 4Chan launched its main page, intended as a sister-site 
to the Japanese 2Chan for discussions of manga and anime. They 
provided the fertile ground for the growth of lolcats, Rickrolling, 
Anonymous, Pedobear and more. 



October 15, 2003 - China launched the Shenzhou 5, its first manned space 
mission, becoming the third country in the world to have independent 
human spaceflight capability. Yang Liwei piloted the capsule showing the 
flags of the People's Republic of China and the United Nations. 



October 24, 2003 - The Concorde made its last commercial flight, a 
victim of air traffic reductions and rising maintenance costs. 100 
passengers, including actress Joan Collins, model Christie Brinkley, made 
the flight from New York to London in it's usual three and a half hours. 
Flights have been slower ever since. 



November 26, 2003 — The final flight of a Concorde ended when the 
supersonic jet touched down at Filton, Bristol, England, the airfield where 
it was built. 



2004 



January 2, 2004 - NASA's Stardust spacecraft successfully flew past 
Comet Wild 2, collecting samples it brought back to Earth 2 years later. 



148 



January 4, 2004 - One half of NASA's Mars Rover team, Spirit, landed on 
Mars to analyze the planet's rocks, looking for evidence of water. Its 
partner rover Opportunity was 21 days behind. Spirit is no longer active, 
but Opportunity keeps on chugging along. 



January 6, 2004 - Apple debuted the iPod Mini, a diminutive 4GB version 
of the iPod available in five colors at $249. 



January 21, 2004 - The Mars Rover Spirit abrupdy stopped transmitting. 
Apparendy too many files had been written to the flash memory and it 
went into fault mode. 



February 4, 2004 - Mark Zuckerberg and a few other guys at Harvard 
launch TheFacebook so Harvard students can look up and hook up with 
each other. They would eventually expand the serve to the world. 



February 20, 2004 - Apple's first iPod mini arrived in Apple retail stores 
and online. It was the first size variation of the iPod. 



March 15, 2004 - Nicolas Jacobsen posted to a forum that he had hacked 
into T-Mobile's network and stolen information from major celebrities 
like Paris Hilton. Jacobsen was later charged with two counts of violating 
the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. 



April 1, 2004 - In one of the best April Fools jokes ever, Google launched 
a real product. Weren't expecting that, were you Internet? Gmail launched 
in invite-only mode, making a Gmail account temporarily prestigious in 
the geek world. 



May 4, 2004 - Apple announced that Steve Jobs would kick off that year's 
Worldwide Developers Conference by talking about Mac OS X 10.4 
Tiger. 



149 



May 15, 2004 - Using a computer with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 processor, 
Josh Findley discovered the 41st Mersenne prime, 224,036,583 - 1. 
Mersenne primes have a close connection to perfect numbers, which are 
equal to the sum of their proper divisors. 



June 21, 2004 - SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed 
piloted vehicle to leave Earth's atmosphere and reach the edge of space. 



July 12, 2004 - Apple announced the iTunes Music Store sold its 
100,000,000th downloaded song. "Somersault (Dangermouse remix)" by 
Zero 7 was purchased by Kevin Britten of Hays, Kansas. 



July 19, 2004 - Apple announced the fourth-generation iPod with 12-hour 
battery life and the ability to shuffle songs. HP announced they would sell 
an HP branded version of this model of the iPod. 



July 26, 2004 - Motorola announced that its next generation of cell phones 
would be iTunes-compatible. This first Apple phone, the Rokr, was not to 
meet with much success. 



August 10, 2004 - The iTunes Music Store library passed the mark of 
1,000,000 songs available. 



August 1 3, 2004 - Adam Curry launched an RSS feed of audio recordings 
called "Daily Source Code" and podcasting became a thing. 



September 8, 2004 — NASA's unmanned spacecraft Genesis crash-landed 
when its parachute failed to open. 



October 4, 2004 - SpaceShipOne returned from its third journey, a 
reusable spacecraft that could carry passengers beyond the earth's 
atmosphere. It won the $10 million Ansari X prize for private spaceflight. 



150 



October 20, 2004 - Mark Shuttleworth sent out an email to Ubuntu 
developers announcing the first official release of the Linux-based 
operating system, Warty Warthog. Every six months since, a new version 
of Ubuntu comes out with a new alliterative animal-inspired name. 



October 26, 2004 - Apple debuted the iPod photo, capable of displaying 
digital photographs and album art on a built-in color screen. 



November 9, 2004 - The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0. It 
featured tabbed browsing and a popup blocker. 

November 23, 2004 - Blizzard launched World of Warcraft, destined to 
become the largest MMORPG ever made. 



2005 



January 11, 2005 - Apple introduced the first iPod Shuffle, a music player 
with no screen and flash memory. 



January 12, 2005 - Deep Impact launched from Cape Canaveral on a 
Delta 2 rocket, headed to an impact with a comet 9P/Tempel. 



January 14, 2005 - The Huygens space probe landed on Titan, Saturn's 
largest moon. It was the first landing in the outer solar system, and the 
furthest from Earth. 



January 15, 2005 - Thanks to a solar flare, ESA's SMART-1 lunar orbiter 
discovered calcium, aluminum, silicon and iron - in Mare Crisium on the 
moon. 



February 15, 2005 - Chad Hurley and Steve Chen debut their new website, 
YouTube. It would quickly become the place to share videos, and quickly 
become hated by the movie and TV industry. 



151 



April 23, 2005 - At 8:27 PM, Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of 
YouTube, uploaded the video "Me at the zoo" making it the first video 
ever to be uploaded to YouTube. 



April 29, 2005 - Apple released Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, introducing 
spodight search and dashboard functionality. 



August 1 8, 2005 — The largest and most widespread power outage in 
history happened on the Indonesian island of Java, affecting almost 100 
million people. 



October 12, 2005 - After previously assuring us nobody wanted to watch 
videos on an iPod, Steve Jobs reversed course and Apple started making 
videos available on iTunes. ABC/Disney was the only TV network 
available at the time but you could get episodes of Lost and Desperate 
Housewives the day after they aired. 



October 27, 2005 - The European Space Agency launched its first 
satellite, a micro-satellite called the SSETI Express Satellite, designed and 
built by European students. 



November 22, 2005 - Microsoft's Xbox 360 went on sale in North 
America. The follow-up to the Xbox would become a smash hit. 



December 28, 2005 - The European Space Agency and the Galileo Joint 
launched GIOVE-A the first test-bed satellite for the Galileo geo-location 
system. 



2006 



January 27, 2006 — It was the end of an era. Western Union discontinued 
its Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. The company still 
handles money transfers. 



March 1 , 2006 - English-language Wikipedia reached its one-millionth 
article, "Jordanhill railway station." 



152 



March 21, 2006 - Jack Dorsey sent the first Twitter post, which read "just 
setting up my twttr". Twttr was the original spelling of the site, which was 
used internally at Odeo.com for the first 4 months. 

May 19, 2006 - Apple opened its 20,000-square foot store at 767 Fifth 
Avenue. It was the second Apple store in New York City but the iconic 
glass cube made it the most famous. 



May 31, 2006 - Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay website and shut it 
down. The site relaunched from servers outside Sweden. 



July 15, 2006 - After a few months being used internally at Odeo, the 
Twttr service launched for public use. They later added some vowels and 
spun Twitter out as its own company. 



November 11, 2006 - The Sony PS3 went on sale with a built-in Blu-ray 
player and hard drive. 



November 30, 2006 - Microsoft released Windows Vista for business use. 
Vista improved on security over Windows XP, but took criticism for 
other features, and never rivaled Windows XP in adoption. 



December 6, 2006 - NASA revealed photographs from the Martian 
Global Surveyor, of two craters called Terra Sirenum and Centauri 
Montes which appeared to show the evidence that water existed on the 
surface Mars, as recendy as five years before. 



2007 



January 16, 2007 - Blizzard released the first expansion to its wildly 
successful World of Warcraft game. The Burning Crusade raised the level 
cap and allowed players flying mounts, at least when they were in 
Oudand. 



153 



January 30, 2007 - Microsoft released Windows Vista for home use. 



March 4, 2007 — Election Day was held in Estonia, and for the first time 
in the world, voters were allowed to vote on the Internet. Approximately 
30,000 voters took advantage of electronic voting. Ballots had to be 
completed three days before Election Day. 



June 29, 2007 - The first Apple iPhone went on sale. 



August 4, 2007 - NASA's Phoenix spaceship launched on its mission to 
survey the Martian Arctic in search of water, geological discoveries, and 
evidence of conditions for biological life. 



August 8, 2007 - Barbara Morgan became the first educator to safely reach 
space on the US Space Shutde Endeavour. 



August 22, 2007 - The Storm botnet sent out a record 57 million virus- 
infected emails. It failed to take down the Internet. 



September 5, 2007 - Apple introduced the iPod Touch, bringing the 
multitouch first introduced on the iPhone, to its popular iPod line. 



September 17, 2007 — AOL announced plans to refocus the company on 
advertising relocate its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia to 
New York City. 



October 31, 2007 - Nintendo of Japan finally ended support for the repair 
of FamiCom game consoles, the Japanese name for NES, citing a 
shortage of parts. It was the end of an 8-bit era. 



November 5, 2007 - China's first lunar satellite, the Chang'e 1 went into 
orbit around the Moon. The spacecraft operated until March 2009. 



November 14, 2007 - The last Direct Current electrical distribution 
system in the US was shut down by Con Edison in New York. 



154 



December 27, 2007 - Warner Music Group became the third major music 
label to begin selling DRM-free MP3s through Amazon. 



2008 



January 10, 2008 - Sony BMG became the last major label to agree to sell 
DRM-free MP3s. 



June 8, 2008 - Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. 



July 1, 2008 - Bill Gates retired as an employee of Microsoft, to focus on 
the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. He remained Chairman of the 
Board. 



July 11, 2008 - Apple's second phone, the iPhone 3G went on sale, 
featuring 3G data connectivity. 



September 10, 2008 - The Large Hadron Collider at CERN powered up 
in Geneva, Switzerland, on its quest to discover the secrets of particle 
physics, especially evidence for the Higgs Boson. 



September 15, 2008 - Electronics retailer Best Buy acquired the Napster 
music service for $121 million, preventing the once dominating music- 
sharing service from going out of business. 



September 23, 2008 - The T-Mobile Gl launched, the first phone to use 
Google's Android OS, as it began it's competition against the barely year- 
old iPhone. 



September 28, 2008 — SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, first private 
spacecraft to enter orbit. 



2009 



155 



January 20, 2009 - The inauguration of US President Barack Obama 
became the most widely streamed Presidential inauguration to that date. 
According to Akamai's Net Usage Index, web traffic peaked at 5.4 million 
requests per minute — and 2 terabits per second. 



February 10, 2009 — One of Motorola's communication satellites Iridium 
33 collided with defunct Russian satellite Kosmos-2251 destroying both. 
It was an unprecedented space collision. 



In 2009 — NASA launched the Kepler space observatory, with a mission 
to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. 



June 18, 2009 - The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA 
robotic spacecraft was launched on its mission to collect information 
about the Moon, particularly around the poles. 



August 28, 2009 - Apple released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard featuring 
many minor improvements and integration with Microsoft Exchange. 



October 9, 2009 - The first lunar impact of the Centaur and LCROSS 
spacecrafts kicked up some dust as part of NASA's Lunar precursor 
Robotic program. The impact has led to greater certainty that there is 
water on the moon. 



October 22, 2009 - Microsoft released Windows 7. And there was much 
rejoicing. 



2010 



March 2, 2010 - The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany rejected 
legislation requiring electronic communications traffic data retention for a 
period of 6 months as a violation of the guarantee of the secrecy of 
correspondence. 



156 



May 21, 2010 — The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), 
launched a solar-sail spacecraft IKAROS aboard an H-IIA rocket. The 
vessel would test out the performance of solar sails, and make a Venus 
flyby later in the year. 



June 4, 2010 — Falcon 9 Flight 1 launched the maiden flight of the SpaceX 
Falcon 9 rocket, setting a new benchmark for non-governmental space 
flight. The rocket put a dummy payload into orbit as a test. 



July 25, 2010 - Wikileaks published classified documents about the War in 
Afghanistan, one of the largest leaks in US military history. 



December 8, 2010 - With the second launch of the SpaceX Dragon, 
SpaceX became the first privately held company to successfully launch, 
orbit and recover a spacecraft. 



2011 



February 3, 2011 - The Number Resource Organization announced that 
the free pool of available IPv4 addresses was fully depleted. The IANA 
allocated the last of the blocks equally between the five Regional Internet 
Registries. 



February 14, 2011 - IBM's Watson, an AI computer system competed 
against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson 
cleaned up, winning $77,147 to Mr. Jennings's $24,000 and Mr. Rutter's 
$21,600. 



February 24, 2011 - The Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Cape 
Canaveral on STS-133, its final mission. 



March 9, 201 1 — The Space Shutde Discovery made its final landing after 
39 flights. 



March 11, 2011 - Apple began selling the iPad 2, a thinner version of the 
first iPad that also included a camera. 



157 



May 10, 2011 - Google announced its Open Hardware Platform and the 
Google Music service, which would eventually become Google Play 
Music. 



July 8, 2011 - The Space Shutde Atlantis launched on the final Space 
Shutde mission. 



July 21, 2011 - The Space Shutde Adantis landed at Kennedy's Shuttle 
Landing Facility Runway 15, ending the US space shutde missions. 



September 22, 201 1 - Facebook announced its new Timeline feature, 
which would collect all your posts and materials in chronological order, 
replacing the old profile. 



September 28, 201 1 - Amazon shook up the tablet market, announcing 
the Amazon Kindle Fire 7-inch tablet for $199. 



October 5, 2011 - Steve Jobs died at his home surrounded by family. The 
co-founder and CEO of Apple had fought pancreatic cancer for years. 



2012 



January 18, 2012 - Many websites, led by Reddit, Wikipedia and others, 
conducted an Internet "blackout" to protest the US SOPA/PIPA bills. 



March 7, 2012 - Apple announced the 3rd generation iPad with a retina 
display and a new Apple TV 



June 27, 2012 - Sergey Brin interrupted a Google announcement of the 
new Google + app to show off the Project Glass smart glasses by having 
sky divers wearing the prototypes, jump out of a zeppelin and land on the 
Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco, while 
streaming video in a Google hangout. 



158 



August 5, 2012 - The Mars Science Laboratory, known as the Curiosity 
Rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars in one of the most 
complicated automated landings ever, involving a sky crane. 



August 23, 2012 - Microsoft unveiled a new logo for the first time in 25 
years, opting for simple squares of color and block type with an 
overlapping 'f and 't'. 



September 20, 2012 - Makerbot Industries released the Replicator 2 3D 
printer, meant for non-expert users, and providing 100 micron resolution 
printing. They also announced the opening of a store in Manhattan. 



October 7, 2012 - SpaceX launched the first private resupply mission to 
the International Space Station. 



October 26, 2012 - Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system went on sale, 
with its tile-based start screen. 



159 



Epilogue 

Full citations for all these entries can be found on the Web at 
http://www.tommerritt.com/about/tech-history-citations/ 



But a few sources proved invaluable and I want to call them out 
specifically. 



Wired.com does a daily post about science and tech history that's 
outstanding. Today in Science History at todayinsci.com was an excellent 
source of ideas for the non-computer oriented entries, especially pre-20fh 
century. The Computer History Museum site, computerhistory.org has an 
excellent calendar covering the rise of the big machines of the mid-late 
20th century in particular. The Great Geek Manual, was another good 
jumping off point for ideas, as was Wikipedia. 



With all these sites, I attempted to find independent confirmation of the 
facts of the entries, especially the dates. I opted for primary sources when 
I could, but reputable secondary sources were often necessary. Academic 
institutions, journals, and publications dedicated to history fall into my 
rough definition of reputable. On occasion I have cited Wired and the 
Computer History Museum directly, when I felt the facts were widely 
confirmed but could only confirm the date at those sites. 



I mostly tried to follow the same citation guidelines as Wikipedia uses, 
which means I did not cite Wikipedia except in a couple cases where 
Wikipedia was the primary source, such as the first Wikipedia post, and of 
course, Jimmy Wales birthday. 



I tried very hard to get these dates and facts right. I'm sure there are 
mistakes. There always are. But compared to the vast number of "this day 
in history" sites that are out there with horribly inaccurate unsubstantiated 
entries, I think I did OK. 



If you have a correction or clarification AND CAN CITE a reliable 
source for it, send the info to tommerritt@tommerritt.com and if I can 
verify it, and use it, I'll give you credit in forthcoming editions. 



160 



161 



STOP 'END OF RUN' 



162
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